How is AI helping people in Gorom Camp—people who are sleeping in mud with nothing but a single blanket and are starving to death? Answer: It isn’t.
Dusoma would be designed for someone who is absolutely impoverished —someone who might ask the AI: How can I get food? How do I stop starving? What should I do? Why am I poor? Then it responds with questions. It listens. It helps. It connects people to funding and aid. If we can find a company that pays a few dollars a day to watch advertisements, we can get thousands of legitimate customers connected to that. Ads for water filtration products, ibuprofen, sanitary napkins.
As we all know, AI can only be helpful if it’s trained on the right questions. So first, we’ve worked to define who this “poorest person on Earth” really is.
Defining the Poorest Person on Earth
With Taza and through our work with queer refugees in east Africa, we’ve developed a definition. This person has absolutely no money—literally not even a dollar. When rations are cut in refugee camps, we don’t just hear it in headlines—we see the literal hunger and starvation first-hand. Refugees are told, There is nothing for you, simply because you have two children (you need 3+ for $4 per month. Or there is nothing for you because you’re gay or trans, and you’re at the bottom of the totem pole.
The situation worsened after the U.S. inauguration on January 20th. Overnight, funding disappeared, and people began to starve. I believe we are on the cusp of mass starvation, and unless something changes, millions may die from hunger or disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
So, who is this person? They are:
- Starving
- Completely without cash or resources
- A refugee—stateless, often holding a refugee passport
- Living with violence—from the state or from neighbors
- Often queer or LGBTQIA+, which exposes them to additional risks
- Located in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in underserved regions
- Living in slums, rural poverty, or urban poverty
- Possibly facing mental or physical health challenges with no access to care
- Administratively erased—such as individuals assigned female at birth who present as male in order to access basic freedoms, like fetching food for a household of women. If it’s discovered that they are menstruating, they could be discovered, raped, beaten and murdered.
This is the person we center in our work. This is who Dusoma is for.
When we think about this work, one of the final things I want to highlight is the issue of violence from neighbors. The person we’re talking about—the poorest person on Earth—is often queer, LGBTQIA+, and in many cases, transgender. So we’re talking about someone who is a trans refugee, starving, and experiencing violence. This is what I call multi-marginalized. There may be a more formal term, but that’s how I’ve come to understand it. That is our product’s persona, the poorest person on earth.