This is the M&E Thursday Talk from October 8th, 2020, Tim Receveur, Director of Programs at PeaceTech Lab, led a discussion on “Mapping and Measuring COVID-19 Violence Around the World”.
This summer, PeaceTech Lab deployed its COVID-19 Violence Tracker with the help of hundreds of volunteers, who are assisting with tracking, categorizing, and visualizing COVID-19 related violence. This data set includes media reports on xenophobia/racism and misinformation leading to violence, domestic violence, gender-based violence, and conflict over resources, among others.
The COVID-19 Violence Tracker has helped PeaceTech to analyze what type of violence has been happening and where it is occurring, but this is just a first step. Tim Receveur discussed how PeaceTech is now working to understand the causes and correlations of the violence, and also to connect data, technology tools, and strategies with networks on the ground who can mitigate it.
In this webinar, Tim shared more about PeaceTech’s new partnership with Georgia Tech and the Digital 100, which allows the project to move beyond volunteer data to state-of-the-art machine learning models. This will enable real-time automated data collection and mapping to locate COVID-19 violence hotspots around the world.