Exploring AI for Humanitarian Impact at the Ubuntu Voice Hackathon

I’m excited to be participating in the Ubuntu Voice Hackathon, where we are exploring how technology and Artificial Intelligence can support communities facing humanitarian emergencies.
Ubuntu Voice is designed as a low-bandwidth emergency-information and peace-support platform that connects users to community-specific AI agents. These agents use trusted documents to provide grounded information and support through both web chat and WhatsApp.
One of the most interesting parts of the project is how it combines several technologies and concepts:
AI and RAG — using trusted documents to provide relevant, grounded responses.
Community-specific AI agents — where each agent can focus on a specific country, region, organization, or humanitarian issue.
Emergency classification — identifying reports related to:
Rights Violations
Casualties
Displacements
Severe Hunger
Data monitoring and visualization — using statistics and maps to monitor reported incidents by category and location.
AI evaluation — testing whether responses are correct, relevant, grounded in the available knowledge base, and based on relevant retrieved information.
As part of the hackathon, I’m also exploring humanitarian crisis contexts such as Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Yemen, and thinking about how AI systems can responsibly support access to trusted information in challenging environments.
What I find most interesting is that this is not only about making an AI chatbot that can answer questions. It is also about asking important questions:
Can the AI be trusted?
Does it answer from the correct knowledge base?
Can it avoid hallucinating information?
Can emergency reports be classified correctly?
What happens when the system receives incorrect, incomplete, or ambiguous information?
For me, this hackathon is an opportunity to learn more about AI systems, RAG, embeddings, AI evaluation, security testing, emergency data, and building technology that can potentially create meaningful social impact.
Looking forward to learning, experimenting, finding bugs, and collaborating with other innovators throughout the hackathon.

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