Guides on co-creating digital tools with crisis-affected people
On this page, you will find two essential guides on Human-Centred Technology Design in Humanitarian Action. These resources, developed by CLEAR Global, are part of an initiative funded by the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH) aimed at establishing participatory and community driven approaches for developing digital technology with people in crisis-affected communities. The goal is to ensure that technology can be used easily and effectively as a humanitarian tool, enhancing aid delivery. Digital technology should be considered just one tool among a comprehensive approach for meeting urgent needs and supporting throughout ongoing crises and recovery. For technology solutions to achieve the most positive impact, they must be co-created with the people they aim to serve.
Meaningful engagement is key to developing effective, inclusive, and sustainable tech tools. This requires ongoing dialogue, flexible processes, and understanding technology as part of a broader humanitarian ecosystem. One way to apply these principles is to use human-centred design, an approach that can guide these types of processes, grounding technology development in the needs of the people it is meant to serve, rather than imposing preconceived solutions. By recognizing people as the best experts on their own lives, using human-centred design should result in digital tools that are more accessible, relevant, safer, and more trusted.
These guides delve into the fundamentals of co-creating digital tools and provide practical insights for humanitarian practitioners, donors, and technology providers. The research to inform both guides took place between January and March 2025, including a desk review of literature, stakeholder mapping, interviews with aid staff, tech experts, and human-centred design practitioners, as well as focus group discussions and ideation workshops with 159 crisis-affected people in northeast Nigeria. While featuring research from Nigeria, the core approaches offer a framework for designing ethical, effective, and human-centred technology in all humanitarian responses, with adaptations for local circumstances.
To ensure the success and sustainability of tech deployments, several core considerations must be addressed. These include building trust, establishing meaningful two-way communication, supporting digital skills and understanding, ensuring data protection and security, and prioritizing inclusiveness.
What you will find in each guide:
- This guide introduces the principles and processes of human-centred design.
- It covers responsible tech development and use, including participatory approaches, informed consent, and ethical considerations. It also notes considerations for emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and drones.
- It outlines who to involve in co-designing technology, emphasizing stakeholder analysis and team expertise, including crisis-affected people, community representatives, aid organisations, technology developers, and language experts.
- The examples section provides illustrations of the benefits and risks of integrating digital technology, such as using language AI for sensitive information, biometric identification, and mobile apps for migrants.
- It details the phases of participatory approaches using the human-centred design framework: discover and understand, explore and ideate, prototype and test, and implement and evaluate. Each phase includes considerations specific to emergency contexts.
- It serves as an introduction to integrating participatory approaches and adapting human-centred design for humanitarian settings.
- This document is a companion guide that dives deeper into community perspectives on the fundamentals of co-creating digital tools.
- It focuses on the five core considerations: trust, meaningful two-way communication, digital skills and understanding, data protection and security, and inclusiveness.
- For each consideration, it explains its importance, offers good practices, shares community perspectives drawn from the research in northeast Nigeria, and provides questions to guide discussions with communities.
- It introduces community personas, fictional but research-based representations (Maimuna, Fatima, Idris, Zainab, Adamu) that capture the diverse experiences, needs, and challenges of people interacting with technology, enhancing empathy and understanding for designers.
- It provides practical insights grounded in the experiences of crisis-affected people to support humanitarians, implementers, decision-makers, and developers in meaningfully engaging affected people throughout the technology solution lifecycle.
Humanitarian practitioners, donors commissioning tech-focused programs, tech developers, programme implementation staff and anyone whose work touches on humanitarian technology can use these guides as a way to enhance their approaches with crisis-affected communities.
For more information, learn about CLEAR Global’s research work or get in touch via research@clearglobal.org.