How IBM’s technology is helping this NGO counsel victims of human trafficking in India

Gender violence and human trafficking have been prevalent in the country for a long time, and continue to this day even. The women and children who fall prey to this kind of abuse are left traumatised after the horrifying incidents. As citizens, who stand as indirect or direct witnesses to this act, it becomes our responsibility to help rehabilitate these victims.

It also becomes equally necessary to equip caregivers of children with the tools they need to provide their best for the children. One such group of good Samaritans is the EmancipAction Foundation.

Founded in 2013, the EmancipAction India Foundation is an NGO that provides informed trauma care to vulnerable populations across the country. The founders, Laura Entwistle and Darcy Pierce, established a first of its kind evidence-based programme to rehabilitate abused and orphaned children.

“We provide preventative mental health care to children living in childcare institutions across India with a curriculum that has taken us years of research to develop. We conduct group sessions as well as individual counselling for those children that are in dire need,” says Vandana Kripalani Bala, Vice President of EmancipAction.

“In addition, we train professionals from different areas who work with vulnerable people on mental health and related topics. We also identify and train lay people to become mental health workers to increase outreach and impact.”

That said, specialists like psychologists and psychiatrists are much less in number than the pool of potential lay counsellors - any person who may possess the qualities to be a counsellor and can be trained. So, a volunteer team of IBM research scientists has created a framework using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help aid organisations identify and hire lay counsellors to quickly help those in need. 

EmancipAction is using this new model to shortlist candidates who are eventually trained as 'mental health workers' based on the results.

Tech for good

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) based evaluation system of emotional intelligence cues and multi-modal information (Multiple Choice Questions, text, and audio responses) from the candidates defines a procedure for building a ranking of potential child counsellors.

“This system gives a more standardised and unbiased model to understand the emotional intelligence of candidates, thereby improving the candidate selection process,” Vandana tells SocialStory.

IBM’s technology including AI, machine learning, Watson Personality Insights tool combined with professional skills were used to build the system. 

Some of the basic features required for a counsellor are counselling awareness, teamwork capabilities, adolescence concerns, facilitation skills, curiosity etc. These qualities are evaluated and scored by the AI model. The scores given by the AI model were then compared with actual scores given by interviewers and they matched well with a very low error margin.

AI model for EmancipAction

EmancipAction has reached out to about 60 candidates through this AI model so far, and close to 30 people have used it internally.

“We intend to revive this as soon as things normalise after the pandemic and aim to reach around 100 childcare institutions (CCIs) in Mumbai in the first phase. Once the AI model becomes more robust, we plan to scale it to all 9000 CCIs in India,” Vandana shares.

The AI model is also equipped to handle multi-lingual responses by leveraging acoustics of speech. The solution uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to overcome language barrier, and build a translation model.

“An IBM volunteer group including AI experts from their Research team spent time in understanding our need, ideated, built this AI mode, and helped implement it successfully,” says Vandana.

The team consisted of Prerna Agarwal, Research Engineer, IBM Research India, Anupama, Research Scientist, IBM Research India, and Gargi Dasgupta, Director, IBM Research and CTO ISA.

EmancipAction has also received monetary funding from IBM for its programme that serves 100+ children in Mumbai, and has helped in training over 30 people in topics related to mental health. In addition, the NGO was selected for IBM Volunteer Excellence Award by CEO Arvind Krishna, with a $ 10,000 grant.

"IBM believes in working closely with our partners to leverage our technology and talent in an ethical manner to positively impact individuals and communities. Our engagement with EmancipAction is a great example of utilising emerging technologies and combining it with a culture of volunteering to deliver true innovation,” says Manoj Balachandran, CSR Leader, IBMIndia & South Asia

He believes the model is an unbiased tool capable of objectively identifying suitable candidates that can be scaled up to effectively address India's lack of qualified counsellors

Counsellor impact

Vandana says the mental health workers come from a variety of backgrounds and have benefitted from the self-awareness they have developed and the empathy it instils in them, not only for people they work with but also their own family and friends. 

Citing an example, she says, one of the girls was dealing with anger issues, self-doubt, anxiety and depression.

“Over the course of two months, she has showed a lot of progress on her anger management skills, and now resorts to overcoming the anger or talking to her caregiver about it," Vandana says.

The NGO also carried out one-on-one sessions with three girls who had depressive thoughts and attempted to run away from a childcare institution. With help, they began to share their personal problems that they were struggling with, and discussed any new problems through all the sessions.

“Gradually, they started to accept and understand their situation in a better way through our discussions, and practiced new ways to cope with the issues that were earlier difficult to handle,” says Vandana.

“The AI model is helping us to hire more emotionally intelligent candidates and that has improved the quality of counselling. The system has transformed our hiring process in terms of time, efforts and quality,” Vandana notes.

Challenges and the road ahead

The pandemic posed a bit of a challenge to the team, as they were forced to go back to the drawing board to assess which needs could be met remotely with the available resources. 

“That’s how we started online group counselling sessions, identifying children who needed individual counselling for depression and anxiety in the homes,” says Vandana.

EmancipAction also launched the Raah Training Institute - where they trained frontline workers from other NGOs and professionals from other areas, to equip them with skills needed to work with the community. 

Talking about the way forward, Vandana hopes to reach out to more children and employ more mental health workers through the system.

“We want to enhance our research department once the pandemic is over and conduct individual interviews. We also hope to extend our training sessions to cover more NGOs across India as well as schools and governmental institutions, all of whom work with children and deal with children's mental health issues regularly,” she signs off.