Digital Dilemmas Debate #2: Balancing Visibility and Vulnerability in Humanitarian Assistance and Social Protection Programmes

What role do humanitarian organizations play in providing social protection services? How can they best collaborate with other providers? And how can they maintain a neutral, impartial and independent approach when doing it?

To conclude the Second DigitHarium Month, we have called in experts from the humanitarian, financial and cash sectors to discuss the many dilemmas that humanitarians confront when deploying social protection services. The debate will explore how humanitarian programmes and social protection systems may work in tandem to support individual and community resilience, and what data protection concerns this can raise especially in fragile environments. Our speakers will draw from their experience to offer examples and insights on the decisions and considerations that humanitarians need to take into account when designing and deploying this type of services.

The discussion will be the last event of the February thematic path – Cash and voucher assistance and social protection systems.

The series

The Digital Dilemmas Debates are a series of roundtable discussions between prominent experts and stakeholders from different sectors about the humanitarian digital transformation, its implications and the work ahead. Each month, they will explore a different type or trend in the technologies used to respond to various types of crisis, and offer reflections on what is coming next.

The Digital Dilemmas Debates are an initiative of the DigitHarium.

Additional resources

The mosaic effect: the revelation risks of combining humanitarian and social protection data, by Jill Capotosto (11 min. read)

Humanitarian engagement in social protection: implications for principled humanitarian action, by Cristina Quijano Carrasco (9 min. read)

Cashless cash: financial inclusion or surveillance humanitarianism? by Pierrick Devidal (6 min. read)

Chapter 9 of the Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action - Second Edition (ICRC)

Chapter 6 of The humanitarian metadata problem: 'Doing no harm' in the digital era (ICRC and Privacy International)

Guidance Note: Data Responsibility in Cash and Voucher Assistance (OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data with CaLP and NORCAP/Norwegian Refugee Council)

[VIDEO EXPLAINER] Data Protection and Cash Transfer Programming (01:27)

Questions? Comments? Ideas?
Write to us at: digitharium@icrc.org