Case studies

The Dutch NGO HiiL conducts comprehensive Justice Needs and Satisfaction surveys to measure justice satisfaction of people and their legal needs. PNGK built a user friendly justice dashboard to display the results of a survey taken of Moroccan citizens. The dashboard highlights the main legal challenges faced in the everyday life of a Moroccan and the paths taken to resolve these problems.

In 2019, PNGK collaborated with UN-Habitat on an interface which details the stresses on urban environments in Yemen. During the course of this project, PNGK developed a proprietary night light mapping tool which allows policy makers, researchers and the public to obtain insights into conflict and post-conflict environments based on changes in night light patterns. Such insights, for example, can help to understand whether there is a correlation between the amount of nightlight produced by a given region and its GDP.

UN-Habitat develops city profiling tools to understand the stress on urban environments which in turn allows donors, governments and organizations to improve their decision making. PNGK collected and aggragated open-source data sets and created a user-friendly dashboard to display the data of the Yemen city profiling tool. It displays a variety of open and proprietary data and showcases indicators at a high and at a detailed level. The dashboard will go live at the end of the year.

Translators Without Borders works on the front lines of humanitarian emergencies, often in conflict zones. Communicating in multiple languages with those directly affected is essential, but bridging the language gap can be difficult. TILES, designed by Translators Without Borders and PNGK, is a hardware/software solution designed to overcome this gap by providing up to date information and receiving feedback in any language, anywhere.

Clothing distribution in refugee camps can often be an undignifying process. People have to stand in line for long periods of time have little to no choice in clothing. In 2018 we teamed up with Movement on the Ground to design and test a system which enables a dignified shopping experience for people living in refugee camps.

NGOs managing refugee camps strive to provide basic needs while treating residents humanely. However, they express a lack of access to local information which hinders their ability to make decisions that are informed, responsive, and impactful. We teamed up with IOM and Seita B.V. and developed a prototype hardware/software solution that provides an estimation of a camps population at any moment.

Currently the voices of millions in need are unheard as there is not enough human translators and it is not a market for for-profit companies. Our team explores the possibility of using machine translation to enhance the communication between Levantine Arabic speakers and aid organizations such the World Food Programme (WFP). If successful it can not only increase the impact of crisis respondents but give a sense of connectedness and dignity to those in need.