Caroline Bazi/Janha AgencyLast fall, Hania Zataari, a mechanical engineer who works for Lebanon’s Ministry of Industry, used her skills to help the country fight. Hailing from Sidon, South Lebanon, she created a chatbot on WhatsApp that made it easy to access much-needed aid.
“They lost their homes, their savings, their jobs, everything they had built,” Haniya says, referring to those forced from their homes by the war.
On September 23, Israel dramatically escalated its offensive against the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, with whom it has been fighting a spiraling conflict since Hezbollah attacked Israel in October 2023.
At least 492 people have been killed in one of Lebanon’s deadliest conflicts in nearly 20 years, according to the Lebanese government.
Thousands of families fled to Sidon after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted 1,600 Hezbollah strongholds inside Lebanon.
Hania says many of the displaced sought shelter in schools and other government buildings, but many others who fled their homes were forced to rent elsewhere or stay with family members. happened
These are the people who were not getting direct help from the government that it wanted to help. Drawing on her programming skills, Hania created the “AidBot” to bridge the gap between aid demand and supply.
Adbot is a chatbot – a type of AI system designed to interact with its users online – that links to WhatsApp. People are programmed to ask simple questions about needing help with their names and locations.
This information is then recorded on a Google spreadsheet that Hania and her team of unpaid volunteers, made up of friends and family, access to distribute aid such as food, blankets, mattresses, medicine and clothing. is
Hania used her free time to create a bot using the Callbell.eu website, which is typically used by businesses to engage with customers on Meta’s platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. are
She explains that the bot, which is still in use today, makes aid distribution more efficient because it reduces the time it spends responding to aid requests on WhatsApp.
“I’m not interested in knowing their names. I just need to know where they are so I can arrange the delivery,” she says.
Take, for example, a request for baby formula. Hania says the bot will ask for the child’s age and the amount needed so she and her team can provide it.
She says the project is funded by donations from Lebanese people living abroad. He has created a publicly available dashboard to record what the project has spent money on and how much aid he and his team have distributed.
At the time of writing they have delivered 78 food parcels, 900 mattresses, and 323 blankets to families of 5 or 10 in Sidon and other parts of Lebanon.
Last October, 47-year-old Khaldoun Abbas and his family fled their home in Najria when they received a call from the IDF telling them to leave for their own safety.
Seventeen people, aged between nine and 78, slept under one roof in a rented three-bed apartment in Sidon.
Khaldoun says he, his wife and their children slept on mattresses with his brother’s family who requested the use of a rescue boat in the flat’s hallway. They also requested blankets, food and cleaning soap.
Unlike his neighbors, he could not return to his home. It was destroyed 11 days later in a confirmed Israeli attack. The IDF told the BBC it had “hit the terrorist infrastructure”.
When we made this accusation against Khaldoun, he denied being affiliated with Hezbollah or any other party.
“This is not the first time Sidon has opened its doors to homeless people,” Hania explains, referring to the influx of people coming to the city.
Sidon has a long-standing reputation for hosting internally displaced people driven from their homes along the Lebanon-Israel border.
The most recent conflict began in October 2023 after the war between Israel and Hamas spilled over into Lebanon when Hamas’ ally Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in support of Gaza.
Lebanon’s health ministry says nearly 4,000 people have been killed and more than a million displaced. The ministry did not say how many of them are civilians or combatants.
In Israel, about 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel, and officials say more than 80 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed.
A ceasefire was agreed between Israel and Lebanon last November. Despite some clashes, it has been largely maintained. But people on the ground say there has been no improvement in aid delivery.
International NGO Islamic Relief told the BBC that “conflicts, destruction and evacuation orders have fueled ongoing displacement in Lebanon, making it difficult to assess the population’s needs and respond to them amid a changing situation.” It’s been hard to pay attention.”
But it is not just war that hinders the distribution of aid.
Bilal Mari, a volunteer who works with Hania, says the problems they face are due to “high demand but low supply” of aid.
He tells her about the deep economic recession that has gripped the country since 2019, meaning the Lebanese government has had to rely heavily on financing from lenders and aid organizations for supplies.
But NGOs are also feeling this crisis. UNICEF Lebanon says that with only 20 percent of the funding it needs, it “faces a huge funding gap,” meaning the charity is unable to help families when they need it most. Need
In a country plagued by financial woes and war, can this aid bot make a tangible difference?
This is the first time John Bryant, a researcher at the think tank Overseas Development Institute, has heard of chatbots being used in this way in the humanitarian sector.
He says that the cultural context in which it is being used is admirable. That is, with knowledge of the channels people are using to communicate with each other and meet them in their own language.
However, he is unsure of its scale, as what works in Lebanon cannot be easily replicated in other parts of the world.
“What technology offers a lot of the time is a standard cookie-cutter approach.
“It’s local designers, local translators, reliable human interactions and elements within the system that turn digital tools into something useful,” he says.
AdBot may not be able to offer a solution to all of Lebanon’s problems, but for families using it, it has made life a little easier.
Additional reporting by Ahmed Abdullah