Sudan civic space monitoring: AI helping to fill the gap when crisis strikes
The kind of problem technology should solve—and the kind of impact we're all about.
The challenge: When capacity disappears overnight
A dedicated team in Sudan had been monitoring civic freedoms across the country—reading through news outlets, analysing content for implications on civic rights, and tracking developments that could affect democratic freedoms. When war broke out, the team had to flee for their safety.
Suddenly, this vital work—work that helps protect democratic freedoms and human rights—was at risk of stopping entirely. With reduced funding and team members scattered, they faced an impossible choice: abandon the project or find another way.
The solution: AI as a bridge, not a replacement
This is where AI becomes genuinely worthwhile. Not replacing wanted jobs, but filling a gap that crisis created.
We built an AI powered tool that could do what the displaced team had been doing: reviewing content from news outlets, deciphering whether it had implications for civic space, and adding what's relevant to a tracking board that monitors civic space issues over time.
Here's what makes this a more ethical use of AI: it's not replacing existing jobs, but filling a capacity gap where the work had already been lost. The jobs disappeared due to the crisis, AI can help enable work that otherwise couldn't happen at all.
We didn't go 'full automation' either. Given the sensitivity of monitoring a country's civic freedoms, we built in a human-in-the-loop process. The AI does the heavy lifting of processing and analysis, but humans review, approve, and edit every piece before it goes live. Hours of work redesigned into minutes.
The tool could also backfill work they hadn't been able to complete during the disruption, helping them catch up while reducing hours of effort into seconds.
The impact
Without this tool, the project would have stopped. Full stop. The team simply doesn't have the resources to continue this crucial monitoring work remotely.
Once live, they'll be able to not only continue the project but run it with fewer people, completely remotely, and stay current with what's happening across Sudan. This time saving is making the project sustainable - even with everything they're dealing with.
Making technology work for human rights monitoring
When you're building a tool to monitor civic freedoms, every technical decision matters.
The AI analyses and summarises content, but humans review, approve and edit every piece before it goes live. The system will track multiple news outlets continuously, plus accept manual input for information gathered through direct communication. It spots civic space implications and creates structured summaries, organising what it finds into trackable civic space issues over time.
The tool can also process backlogged content to bring monitoring up to date, filling months of gaps that would otherwise be lost. The approach can potentially work for any country: plug in local news sources and you have automated civic space monitoring with human oversight. Rather than full automation, we prioritised accuracy and human judgment for such sensitive content, making sure the system supports rather than replaces people's decision-making.
Looking forward
This project shows something important: AI's most powerful uses don't need to be about replacing human work. It cab be enabling human work to continue when circumstances would otherwise make it impossible.
The real-world impact makes this particularly meaningful. This isn't just about building an AI tool—it's about keeping essential oversight of democratic freedoms going during a humanitarian crisis.
This project flips the usual AI narrative. Instead of "AI taking jobs," this shows "AI filling a job that had already been lost"—keeping work going that otherwise couldn't happen. For organisations dealing with displacement, resource challenges, or simply not having enough people, thoughtfully designed AI tools can be the difference between continuing vital work and stopping entirely.