Addressing Gender-Based Violence
The digital safe space co-created with and for women and girls in crisis situations
14-year old Amina lives in a camp for displaced people in Ninewa, Iraq. Like most teenagers, she has lots of questions about her health and body.
Amina overheard her parents arranging her marriage to an older cousin. Concerned about dangers linked to teen pregnancy, she realized she had nobody she felt she could safely speak to. Her only access to a phone was her father’s, so seeking answers online was not an option available to her. Barely able to read and write, she watches videos or listens to podcasts but is careful about which websites she visits in case her father finds out and gets angry.
While Amina’s story is a fictional blend based on the many women and girls encountered by UNICEF in crisis situations globally, her situation is very real and all too common.
One in five young women aged between 20 and 24 years were married as children, and nearly a quarter of partnered/married adolescent girls have experienced sexual or physical abuse. Additionally, almost twice as many adolescent girls (25 per cent) compared to boys are not in education, employment or training.
While physical ‘safe spaces’ can offer protection and psychosocial support, for reasons like distance or prevailing gender norms, access often isn’t possible for many women and girls - especially during humanitarian crises, precisely when they are at greater risk of gender-based violence (GBV).
In 2021, UNICEF’s GBV in Emergencies team launched ‘Laaha’- the virtual safe space for girls and women in Iraq and Ecuador, with resources linked to financial literacy, legal rights and mental health. The platform encourages engagement through quizzes, podcasts and videos and connects users with vetted local resources. Those with poor literacy can access text-to-audio options, while an exit button quickly redirects to a ‘neutral’ external page.
Women and girls were key architects in the design and testing of Laaha to ensure the right features and content were included. The inclusion of users with disabilities, for example, resulted in Laaha meeting WCAG 2’s web content accessibility standards.
“Women and girls, including GBV survivors, are not a homogenous group, so you can’t build a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Abeera Akhtar, GBV Technology Consultant, UNICEF Child Protection Section.
Laaha also helps women and girls feel less ashamed and isolated with interactive features like a moderated forum and a chatbot. As one user said, “They don’t want us to know anything, and the day after we are married, they expect us to know everything.”
“The truth is that I felt safe visiting the site. It's not like visiting other sites. There can be so many different sources of information, it can be true, or it can be a lie, so I was sure to enter the site.”
25-year-old Laaha user.
“It's like I got excited by the fact that I got that little message that explained to me that it's already like my assistant who is going to help me.”
20-year-old Laaha user.
Laaha is available in Afghanistan, Ecuador, Iraq, Lebanon, Moldova, the State of Palestine, Ukraine and Venezuela, hosting around 140 content modules. It is available in Arabic, Burmese, English, French, Kurdish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
As GBV persists globally, there’s a growing need for Laaha. The ambition is to adapt Laaha’s content to a broader range of users and crises, making it available in several additional languages such as Creole, Dari, Lingala, Pashto, and Swahili, all forthcoming. The ambition is to expand the use of Laaha from 365,000 users today, to over one million by the end of 2025.
With its experience of scaling technologies in low-resource environments to address humanitarian challenges, UNICEF’s Office of Innovation is exploring open models for AI-powered machine translation and text-to-speech conversion, meaning that Laaha can be customized, for example, using female voices. Meanwhile, other commercial machine translation, text-to-speech and generative AI options are also being explored.
“Prioritizing the end user’s experience, the choice of technology will depend on which performs best for specific languages and contexts. We are learning as we go, ensuring that Laaha benefits from the early adoption of cutting-edge solutions.”
Katherine Hoffmann Pham, AI Specialist, UNICEF Office of Innovation.
Though led by UNICEF, Laaha’s success highlights the importance of collaboration for effective scaling, primarily with women and girls, alongside GSMA for gender digital divide research and Meedan for GBV-focused moderation guidelines. According to one partner organization case manager who preferred to remain anonymous, “I’ve seen a huge difference, even over the last year, women are learning about their rights and teaching their daughters.”
