Privacy-Preserving Data for Humanitarian Action Webinar

Humanitarian organizations around the world are striving to use data to enhance aid effectiveness, inform critical decision-making, and support transparent research and policymaking. Privacy risks create serious challenges when sharing sensitive information about vulnerable populations, as unintended exposure or misuse of such data can result in discrimination, exploitation, or harm, disproportionately affecting the very individuals the data sharing seeks to benefit.

This webinar offers an in-depth look at a pioneering use case from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, where differential privacy enabled the generation of a synthetic census of refugees, opening new possibilities for sharing refugee data while rigorously protecting individual privacy. Join us to explore how privacy-preserving technologies can enable the sharing of refugee data, ultimately strengthening trust, transparency, and supporting evidence-based research and policy decisions.

Speakers

• Nitin Kohli is a Staff Scientist at CEGA and Principal Investigator of the Data Privacy Lab, researching topics that span privacy, fairness, and manipulability of statistical and algorithmic mechanisms. Nitin utilizes techniques from applied mathematics to construct statistical and algorithmic mechanisms with provable guarantees over the outcomes of their use, and to show the inherent limitations present in certain technologies. As part of this research agenda, Nitin has novel privacy-enhancing technologies for humanitarian, anti-poverty, and financial inclusion initiatives.
• Federico Sanson is a Data Curator with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He works at the intersection of data protection, privacy, and innovation, supporting the responsible use and sharing of data in humanitarian contexts. His recent work focuses on advancing anonymization practices and exploring privacy-preserving technologies, such as synthetic data and differential privacy, to enable safe and ethical data sharing.