Henrietta Ridley,Katherine Hoffmann Pham, Kaan Cetinturk UNICEF

Topic : AI to Advance Humanitarian and Development Outcomes for Children

AI is currently transforming the humanitarian and development sectors, with applications ranging from disease outbreak prediction to personalized tutoring and providing agricultural advice. As AI applications proliferate in the future, children will be some of the most affected, and there is a critical need to ensure that such applications respect children’s rights and advance their well-being. In this session, we will talk about UNICEF’s child-centric approach to AI. We will provide an overview of UNICEF’s recently developed AI strategy, the key value levers it is designed to activate - advancing programme impact, boosting operational effectiveness, and strengthening child rights advocacy. We will also share the lessons learned from our early implementation efforts and highlight programmatic use cases of AI within UNICEF, ranging from machine translation to pollution monitoring to the use of Generative AI for creating accessible digital textbooks.