Category: News

By Ryan van Leent & Ian Ryan, SAP

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is underpinning the next technology revolution. This is a revolution that offers huge potential benefits for Social Services. But, despite AI’s promise to accelerate growth and streamline day-to-day operations, AI uptake in the public sector worldwide has been limited. The SAP Institute for Digital Government collaborated with the University of Queensland to examine the challenges and the reasons behind this.

Building a successful AI transformation programme

We studied nine AI projects and interviewed and surveyed data scientists, system developers, domain experts, and managers. Through our inquiry we identified a set of common challenges that slow down AI adoption. Our research suggests that to ensure successful use of AI, public sector organizations need to initiate transformation programmes that systematically address these challenges and maximise value creation for a range of stakeholders, especially citizens.

Guidelines for government leaders

We present the following guidelines for delivering successful AI programmes in Social Services:
1. Building AI capability: AI development is resource-intensive and requires significant ongoing commitment to secure high-quality data, platforms, and talent.
2. Redesigning Work for AI: AI systems’ growing ability to outperform humans in some tasks can represent a compelling managerial challenge. Despite its capabilities, AI is limited in its ability to understand context and interpret situations. Thus, it is important to keep people in the loop as safeguards to machine fallacies.
3. AI oversight and assurance: AI decision-making can be opaque for human decision-makers and some AI has been shown to be biased and discriminatory. Public sector organizations need to establish precise oversight and assurance mechanisms to minimize risks for stakeholders (especially vulnerable people).
4. Managing cultural change: Public sector organizations can face resistance both from their internal and external consumers regarding use of AI for decision-making.
5. Creating stakeholder value: Justifying public expenditure for projects that are risky and have unclear value metrics, can make it difficult to be an early adopter of AI.

Figure 1: A framework for building a successful AI transformation programme

Further research

This first stage of our research identified common AI challenges for government and developed a high-level framework of capabilities, capacities and processes that are needed to create value from AI while minimizing the risks. Further research (to be published in future editions of the ESN newsletter) will explore the specific challenges of AI “explainability’ and building AI capability.

The research paper can be downloaded here

How can children and young people serve as a link between professional network actors, and even become network actors themselves in the construction described below?

Children and young people have an established place as members of society. They are represented in many areas of society, and themselves appear as social actors. Young people are visible in sports, in the cultural sphere, in associations and even in politics. Nevertheless, their voice is rarely heard within society, despite these activities.

In this regard, little has changed in recent years, although the issue of participation rights and opportunities for young people has drawn increasing attention. The coronavirus pandemic, along with its impact on our societies, has once again highlighted this phenomenon. Much is said about and decided for children and youth, with the young people themselves having little say in the outcome. What might explain this phenomenon, and how can it be counteracted?

Many years ago, Hamburg set out to define urban neighbourhoods as social spaces, and to strengthen them in specific targeted ways. As a city-state, Hamburg takes advantage of its municipal structure to view this issue from a cross-locational perspective. However, it is also able to direct the resources of its inner-city structures toward the particular challenges faced by social spaces in individual city neighbourhoods.

A variety of actors operate in these social spaces. In this brief essay, we focus particularly on the perspective of youth welfare services. Youth welfare services account for a high percentage of the overall social services workforce, yet most people have no contact with youth services organizations. Child protection issues are not widely discussed in society, either by adults or young people themselves. At first glance, it thus appears that children and young people who are in residential or non-residential educational programs can contribute little to strengthening the social spaces in which they reside, at least with respect to this particular role.

Alongside educational assistance, child and youth work is also an important component of youth welfare programmes. However, youth work has faced competition in recent years. Full-day school programmes, which consume a significant amount of time in young people’s schedules, is one such source of competition. The advancing march of digitalization in society is another source, as time spent online increasingly competes with the large repertoire of potential free-time activities offered by the city of Hamburg.

What does this have to do with children and youth as a link between social-space network partners?

Hamburg has set out to create deeper networks between the existing actors with whom children and youth spend time in the social space, both spatially and/or functionally. We mention three categories of actors specifically here: schools, sports clubs and youth-work organizations, all of which should continue to develop in the direction of youth media work. The Social City programme has helped raise awareness that active residents in a neighbourhood can help bring about a high degree of activation in their social space. Hamburg’s youth welfare programmes focus strongly on social spaces, with the goal of strengthening the ability of individual neighbourhoods to engage in self-activation. Such programmes create links between actors with the active young people serving as a bridge, and in so doing reach all social groups. In this regard, knowledge regarding other actors’ capabilities is emerging as a success factor.

A wide range of circumstances and motivations can provide both a reason for intensive cooperation between actors and a path toward solutions. These may include learning deficits, sports and physical activities, and young people’s own psychological problems or those of their parents; however, such motivations may also extend to efforts to provide safe interactions with media, integration into the social space due to out-of-home placement in residential care programmes or language barriers, or simply the desire to create healthy social space environments that are facilitative of a young person’s well-being thanks to a network of social contacts.

In each case, all actors share a common concern with the welfare of the same young person. This is where the needs of children and young people become visible. In the future, this population should also be given a more prominent voice through additional forms of participation. Once this step has been taken, children and young people will no longer be simply links in a network, and will instead become network actors in their own right.

• Meal vouchers for low-income families in the United Kingdom: In the lock-down context, the British government replaced the unavailable free school meals for children in low income families with a voucher solution. In one week, one million children received a £15 weekly allowance through a QR code voucher to purchase food from food stores.
• Meal vouchers for citizens in greatest needs in Italy: The Civil Protection Service has provided municipalities with €400 million to be spent on food provision during the Covid-19 emergency. Hundreds of them have adopted meal vouchers to ensure the allocation of food.
• Childcare vouchers for workers providing essential services in Italy: Italian local authorities have also been using vouchers for the provision of childcare services for children whose parents are home-office workers, workers from essential economic sectors, and healthcare professionals.
• Holiday vouchers for low-income households in France: two of the biggest regions in the country have decided to finance holiday vouchers for low income households as a means to revive the local tourism industry while providing welfare support for families who have difficulties in financing their holidays. For instance, the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region will provide holiday vouchers amounting to €10 million. The Grand-Est region will provide 10,000 vouchers to families amounting to €5 million in total.
• Using vouchers for the implementation of the European Fund for the Most Deprived (FEAD): Amendments to the FEAD regulation enable the buying of protective equipment for those delivering aid. Also, food and basic material assistance can be delivered through vouchers, lowering risks of infection. Introduced as a mechanism for the current crisis, e-vouchers will most likely remain as a means of implementation, as already in 2018, the Commission proposed their permanent introduction for the new FEAD programming period starting in 2021.

Christiaan van Veen is the Director of the Digital Welfare States and Human Rights Project at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, which is based at New York University School of Law. Van Veen’s work focuses on the impact of state digitalization on human rights, including in the area of social protection and assistance. Van Veen has extensive experience in the field of international human rights law. He previously served as a special advisor on new technologies and human rights to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Van Veen has also been a consultant for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has undertaken numerous human rights fact-finding missions to countries around the world, including Chile, Romania, Mauritania, China, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

1. What are the latest trends in the digitalization of welfare states?

Governments in the Global North have been experimenting with the use of digital technologies and data in the context of their welfare states for decades now. Earlier digitalization efforts in the welfare state focused mostly on streamlining internal processes, such as information management. We then saw a trend toward moving existing government services online and the introduction and updating of government websites and portals, often under the heading of “e-government’. In recent years, there is much talk of, and many related government reports and strategies about, “digital government’ and “digital transformation’. What we are witnessing is that digital technologies are becoming integral to key stages and functions of social protection and assistance programs, from enrollment and registration, to decision-making, communication with beneficiaries, enforcement and investigation of risks and needs, as well as actual service delivery and so on. Governments are also increasingly aiming to connect separate “data siloes’ and make use of large quantities of digital data available in the private sector. More recently, we also see that governments are increasingly experimenting with the use of Artificial Intelligence tools, including in the welfare state, although these are still relatively early days.

2. What are the three biggest challenges in the digitalization of welfare states in terms of respect of ethics and human rights?

My work relates to the risks and opportunities of digital welfare states from the perspective of human rights. Three major challenges from the perspective of human rights relate to democratic oversight, transparency and accountability. First, technological innovation in social protection systems is still often perceived as technocratic fixes with overwhelmingly positive or neutral implications for the human rights of individuals. However, digitalization is driven by political preferences and has unequal impacts on individuals, including in relation to their rights. Second, and relatedly, many of the digitalization projects within government, including in the welfare area, happen under the political radar and with limited involvement of legislatures, media and the general public. Oftentimes, the technology itself is difficult to understand or otherwise shielded from scrutiny. Third, this means that those responsible for digital innovation in social protection and assistance are not often held to account, even when rights violations may be at stake. Because many of these developments happen away from the spotlight, or sometimes even explicitly in secret, it is exceedingly difficult for individuals who have been affected to realize their right to a remedy when their rights and interests are harmed.

3. How can we ensure the digitalization of social services remains ethical?

Let me first comment on the framing of this question. Because much technological innovation comes from the private sector, there is has been fierce resistance from this corner against any regulation of digital technologies. Big Tech and other parts of the technology industry have, once their products and services came under more intense scrutiny, proposed that self-regulation, guidelines and ethical values regulate the technologies they produce. In short, the fact that “ethics’ are often invoked in discussions about digitalization is an outcome of this corporate resistance to regulation and not a neutral framing.

Slowly, for instance in the recent White Paper on Artificial Intelligence by the European Commission, we see a shift in the debate towards regulating technology via law and to underline their human rights rather than their ethical impact. That makes a difference because human rights are legal norms and can be invoked before national and international courts and other accountability mechanisms. Ethics, on the other hand, are not legal norms, often ill-defined and mostly without attached accountability mechanisms. I am not against ethical digitalization, obviously, but more interested in helping to ensure that technology compluies with public regulation and ensuring that technology does not contribute to human rights violations.

To ensure that the digitalization of social services complies with existing human rights law, we need to be aware of the challenges involving democratic oversight, transparency and accountability mentioned above. There appears to be a gradual shift in that regard, with increasing attention from parliaments, media, other oversight bodies and the general public for the fact that individual rights are at stake. An important step is that, from political decision-making to implementation, human rights law needs to be taken into account. There is an important procedural dimension here. An important step to make sure human rights are taken into account is to make sure that those individuals and groups who are affected by a technological innovation are consulted every step of the way, from the political decision-making stage to the actual implementation.

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ESN partner Raisoft, in collaboration with interRAI, has developed and digitalised a tool to identify and assess particularly vulnerable social groups during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The interRAI COVID-19 Vulnerability Screener (CVS) is a quick, convenient tool to identify persons who may be especially vulnerable. The CVS consists of a self-assessment survey that adults and people with disabilities can use to identify the presence of COVID-19 symptoms, frailty, and major co-morbidities that may lead to increased mortality risks related to COVID-19.

This new CVS can be carried out either by a health care professional or by a lay person, over the phone or in-person. A self-administered version of the CVS is also in development.

CVS can be used to:

• Identify persons who need urgent care for emergency health concerns
• Contact public health authorities for COVID-19 testing
• Prioritise persons who require a full assessment by a clinician
• Monitor risks related to underlying medical issues, functional problems, distress mood, or social isolation.

The tool will soon be offered to national healthcare providers and professionals with responsibility for public health. InterRAI has engaged collaborators in Canada, South Africa and Europe to begin using the CVS in primary care, geriatric services, and community care programmes to reach out to vulnerable persons living in the community.

More detailed information about the CVS and how it works can be found at this link.

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Taking into account the impact that Covid-19 is having on the organisation of the 28^th European Social Services Conference planned in Hamburg on 8 -10 July 2020 and particularly considering that large events and social gatherings have been banned in Germany until 31 August 2020, it is with great regret that we have to postpone the Conference to 30 June – 2 July 2021.

However, the conference’s theme “Transforming community care’ is more relevant than ever in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis on health and social services and local communities across Europe. We are very happy to confirm that the Hamburg government and the German federal ministry will continue to support ESN as key partners for the conference.

If you have any queries, please contact us at conference@esn-eu.org.