- I’ve been forced to flee my home – where can I find a temporary safe place to stay?
- I think my child is getting sick – where is the nearest doctor?
- I don’t know what my rights are here – who can answer my questions?
Imagine not being able to get the answers to these questions, just because support isn’t available in your language.
Yet that is the reality for many people affected by crises around the world.
More and more people each year are internally displaced – forced to flee their homes but not crossing a national border. At the end of 2023, this number reached a record high of 75.9 million people across 116 countries. Millions of others have been forced to flee across borders, or remain in their home communities but face the devastating impacts of conflict, climate emergencies and other disasters.
Language inclusion helps people make life-saving decisions
In an emergency, information can save lives. Confusing or untrustworthy information means people can’t make critical decisions. They can’t know which areas are safer to flee to. They can’t find basic necessities such as shelter or medical aid. And they can’t connect with service providers and others offering support.
Accurate information in the right language, using familiar words, through a channel they trust can change this.
Even when someone has stayed in their home country, they often face language barriers.
Many countries experiencing humanitarian crises right now are highly linguistically diverse – meaning they have one or a few national languages, plus tens or even hundreds of languages spoken in specific areas or communities. The Democratic Republic of Congo speaks over 200 languages. Nigeria speaks over 500. In many contexts, only a minority of the population uses the national language as their first language. Those who are fluent in it are likely to be younger, educated, male, economically privileged and from urban areas. For many others, a local language might be the only language they can use and understand.
In a crisis, sharing a common language with aid providers is the exception – not the norm.
Women, children and other groups struggle to find tailored support in their first language
Aid organizations provide important information and services – but they often operate in national and dominant languages only. They can struggle to communicate effectively because they don’t fully understand the language diversity of the communities they serve, or don’t have the right resources and expertise to offer support in all relevant languages.
This language gap can put anybody facing a crisis at risk – but groups who are already vulnerable face even greater risks.
Women the world over are less likely to have access to education than men. They have fewer chances to learn the national or dominant language and to be literate. Other groups such as people with disabilities, older people, and rural or Indigenous communities are also more likely to experience the educational exclusion that leads to language exclusion.
Children can be especially vulnerable. Children – estimated at 41% of the globally displaced population in 2021 – face extra barriers to understanding what is going on, where to go for help, and who is safe to talk to. Children need information in their first language, using words and concepts they can understand, shared in a way that does not cause them extra distress and confusion.
Humanitarians need to close the digital language gap
Of the world’s over 7,000 languages, only a handful are meaningfully online. Just 17 languages dominate online content – these are largely global, economically powerful languages, not the first languages of communities facing crisis.
Tools like machine translation and speech recognition can help leverage the power of technology to reach more languages. Yet the quality of these tools is often too low for the languages needed in many emergencies.
At the same time, organizations are trying to respond to more crises with fewer resources, so they are using digital tools more and more to get information and services to people in need.
The result? Anyone facing a language barrier is now locked out of this digital support – so the ‘digital language gap’ widens.
Language-inclusive technology can change this
The good news is that an inclusive approach to digital services helps close this gap when face-to-face support is not available.
Organizations and tech developers can work together with marginalized language speakers to develop the tools, in the languages needed, for those most in need. They can collaborate to generate voice and text data in the right languages, use these data sets to build language models, then use these models to create a huge range of accessible tools.
With language awareness, digital services could look like:
- People using mobile money interfaces in their preferred languages to receive cash transfers so they can spend the money on the things they need most.
- Displaced people speaking a marginalized language accessing information via a user-friendly chatbot in their language.
- Community members in extreme weather ‘hotspots’ receiving a warning on their mobile in their first language so they know a disaster is coming.
- Displaced children using educational technology content and resources to minimize their disruption to schooling.
Awareness, resources and effort are needed to put this support in place for everyone facing language barriers. With your support, we can help to close the language gap.
Donations to CLEAR Global help to:
- Make content available for speakers of marginalized languages
- Support humanitarian organizations to offer multilingual services to effectively provide safety for affected populations
- Build technology that bridges the language gap so fewer people face these challenges