Positive Sparks, platform to give voice to isolated or excluded young people

admin on 20 April 2021

Youngsters participating in a face-to-face workshop from the project. Retrieved from Bytes’ website.

Youth participation platform which helps to give a voice to young people who are more isolated or excluded, to express their concerns, needs and opinion on the services offered by the community. The platform uses “Machine Learning” to analyse and interpret young people’s responses in a fast and automatic way.

In addition to empowering the most excluded young people and facilitating their participation, Positive Sparks allows social services and organisations working with young people with difficulties (mental health, drug abuse, school drop-out, etc.) to detect deficiencies in services, improve their interventions and identify new needs requiring new responses or services. The platform also offers the Public Administrations to use Positive Sparks for the development of youth-related public policies.

Within this initiative, more specific projects have emerged, such as Rural Sparks, which helps to give a voice to young people with difficulties in rural areas. On the other hand, Positive Sparks is not only a virtual platform, but also organizes workshops and presence activities to better meet young participants and to interact with them at first hand. Workshops are imparted by the Bytes organization in collaboration with other organizations, teaching centres, etc. It is currently a tool only available in English.

Characteristics of innovation

Adolescence and youth, Bank of innovations, Fully inclusive cities, Group intervention, Information and planning, Lab, Link with the community, New service, New technological tool, Poverty and exclusion, Prediction and prevention, User empowerment

Location

Northern Ireland

Partners/Funders

National Lottery Community Fund, Epic CIC.

Genesis

The first prototype started in Belfast in 2018, under the name “Voices for Impact”. It has now spread beyond Northern Ireland to Ireland, the United Kingdom and some other countries.

Level of implementation

Fins ara hi ha participat més de 1200 de joves amb dificultats d’Irlanda del Nord i altres llocs, tant d’àrees urbanes com rurals.

Further information

Propose your innovation

See our selection of innovations

Banc d’innovacions

Fenix, a therapeutic garden and orchard for drug addicts

iCalidad, a technological tool for the quality of life of people with ASD

Mano, an app for social professionals working on the streets and in shelters

Moods, promoting good screen use among teenagers and young people

Raaji, chatbot to inform and empower girls and women

admin on 21 March 2021

Girls using the chat-bot Raaji. Retrieved from Aurat Raaj’s website.

Chat-bot that informs girls and women about gender issues and helps them empower and defend their rights. It uses a virtual character, Raaji, which is able to answer questions and have a conversation through artificial intelligence algorithms. It provides information on issues considered taboo which are of great importance to female empowerment, such as issues of reproductive health, security or economic autonomy. In addition, a team of professionals detects if there are cases that require professional intervention and are derived from them to the most appropriate services.

The Pakistani organization that has developed it, Aurat Raaj, also collaborates with schools and social organizations to make workshops and activities to empower women and girls, and to try to break some stigma surrounding topics such as menstrual hygiene. To further expand this task, they have created an animated series where the main character, Raaji, passes through different situations considered taboo but which are part of the day-to-day life of many girls. In this way, girls see themselves in a character that they identify with, who normalizes and overcomes these situations, encouraging them to take the initiative through activities such as training courses, personal defence, etc.

Chat-bot is a versatile tool available in English and Urdu, and has also been adapted to Covid-19 to provide reliable information about the disease for girls and boys, in an easy way. Raaji is a sample of how technology can help expand and take the work of social organisations further, creating a tool that is easy to access and which allows the easy and private reporting of issues of great importance and on which there are taboos or misinformation.