Language inclusion helps people make life-saving decisions

In an emergency, information can save lives. Confusing or untrustworthy information means people can’t make critical decisions. They can’t know which areas are safer to flee to. They can’t find basic necessities such as shelter or medical aid. And they can’t connect with service providers and others offering support.

Accurate information in the right language, using familiar words, through a channel they trust can change this.

Even when someone has stayed in their home country, they often face language barriers. 

Many countries experiencing humanitarian crises right now are highly linguistically diverse – meaning they have one or a few national languages, plus tens or even hundreds of languages spoken in specific areas or communities. The Democratic Republic of Congo speaks over 200 languages. Nigeria speaks over 500. In many contexts, only a minority of the population uses the national language as their first language. Those who are fluent in it are likely to be younger, educated, male, economically privileged and from urban areas. For many others, a local language might be the only language they can use and understand. 

In a crisis, sharing a common language with aid providers is the exception – not the norm.

Women, children and other groups struggle to find tailored support in their first language

Aid organizations provide important information and services – but they often operate in national and dominant languages only. They can struggle to communicate effectively because they don’t fully understand the language diversity of the communities they serve, or don’t have the right resources and expertise to offer support in all relevant languages.

This language gap can put anybody facing a crisis at risk – but groups who are already vulnerable face even greater risks.

Women the world over are less likely to have access to education than men. They have fewer chances to learn the national or dominant language and to be literate. Other groups such as people with disabilities, older people, and rural or Indigenous communities are also more likely to experience the educational exclusion that leads to language exclusion. 

Children can be especially vulnerable. Children – estimated at 41% of the globally displaced population in 2021 – face extra barriers to understanding what is going on, where to go for help, and who is safe to talk to. Children need information in their first language, using words and concepts they can understand, shared in a way that does not cause them extra distress and confusion.

Humanitarians need to close the digital language gap

Of the world’s over 7,000 languages, only a handful are meaningfully online. Just 17 languages dominate online content – these are largely global, economically powerful languages, not the first languages of communities facing crisis. 

Tools like machine translation and speech recognition can help leverage the power of technology to reach more languages. Yet the quality of these tools is often too low for the languages needed in many emergencies. 

At the same time, organizations are trying to respond to more crises with fewer resources, so they are using digital tools more and more to get information and services to people in need. 

The result? Anyone facing a language barrier is now locked out of this digital support – so the ‘digital language gap’ widens.

Language-inclusive technology can change this

The good news is that an inclusive approach to digital services helps close this gap when face-to-face support is not available. 

Organizations and tech developers can work together with marginalized language speakers to develop the tools, in the languages needed, for those most in need. They can collaborate to generate voice and text data in the right languages, use these data sets to build language models, then use these models to create a huge range of accessible tools.

With language awareness, digital services could look like:

• People using mobile money interfaces in their preferred languages to receive cash transfers so they can spend the money on the things they need most. 
• Displaced people speaking a marginalized language accessing information via a user-friendly chatbot in their language. 
• Community members in extreme weather ‘hotspots’ receiving a warning on their mobile in their first language so they know a disaster is coming.
• Displaced children using educational technology content and resources to minimize their disruption to schooling. 

Awareness, resources and effort are needed to put this support in place for everyone facing language barriers. With your support, we can help to close the language gap. 

Critical miscommunication: Rahma’s health emergency

Recently, the weight of this communication barrier became life-threatening. When her daughter Rahma fell ill, Falmata rushed her to the camp clinic. The doctors, speaking only Hausa, were unable to get answers to their questions or understand Falmata’s explanations of her daughter’s symptoms. After a hurried examination, they prescribed medicine, but without understanding their instructions and unable to read the directions on the medicine packet, Falmata felt lost.

In her desperation, she turned to her neighbor for help, asking him to read the information on the packet for her. He missed a critical instruction: the oral rehydration salts needed to be mixed with boiled water to ensure the solution was free from germs. This small but vital piece of information was lost in translation, and it pushed Rahma into a serious health crisis.

Displaced women’s struggle for safety

Falmata’s experience highlights a painful truth: due to their dependency on others for communication, displaced women and children face heightened vulnerability, risking violence and exploitation in overcrowded camps. In a world where language barriers compound their struggles, these women often go unheard, their voices lost through circumstances beyond their control. 

Language inclusion goes beyond interpretation or translation alone. For Falmata, it represents the power to access her rights—ensuring her children receive proper care and that she can secure food, shelter, health, education and safety, all without becoming trapped in a cycle of dependency.

A call for change

The experiences of marginalized language speakers like Falmata are rarely visible to those in positions to bring about change. At CLEAR Global, we are working to connect individuals like Falmata, ensuring their needs are heard and addressed.

We build technology solutions to connect marginalized language speakers. You can help support language inclusion for people like Falmata by making your donation. Some of the solutions we have developed to help speakers of marginalized languages include: 

• Chatbots: text-based conversational tools designed to help people obtain accurate information. In contexts like internally displaced persons camps, chatbots help people reach available services and access essential information in their language. 
• Voice-enabled tools: like chatbots, these help people get answers to their questions in their own language. Being voice-enabled, they are accessible to people who can’t read or write well. And because they aren’t human, these tools can decrease people’s fear of interacting and making complaints.
• Devices for communal use: These are devices we make available to wider communities. Those who don’t have access to their own phones can use this device to ask questions anonymously, confidently, and independently. The device could also offer audiovisual content beyond just voice, enhancing the user experience and providing a much richer information service.

With these tools, Falmata’s challenges would be minimized. She would be able to obtain the information she needs and be heard. Help us connect people like Falmata so her needs can be heard in the language she speaks.

*Falmata is a pseudonym for one of many women who find themselves in displacement across the world in conflict areas like northeast Nigeria.