Technology has long been used to fight human trafficking. Now, in a first for an Indian NGO, My Choices Foundation used big data to help women live a life free from abuse and violence.  As part of the NGO’s program — Operation Red Alert, a prevention program determines areas of high risk and prioritizes its education efforts. This prevention program is targeted at villagers, children and teachers to help them block the traffickers.

As part of the CSR program, Australian data analytics company Quantium developed a big data solution that analyzes India’s census data, government education data and other sources for factors such as drought, poverty level, proximity to transportation stations, educational opportunities, population, and distance to police stations to identify the villages and towns that are most at risk of human trafficking.

For the NGO, the biggest impediment was identifying high risk areas in India. With over 600,000 villages in India, Operation Red Alert needed help to determine which areas were most at risk to prioritize education efforts.

Quantium & Cisco partner to save lives

With help from Cisco, Quantium and My Choices Foundation is using advanced analytics applications to help determine villages which are at risk. Adam Driussi, CEO and co-founder, Quantium said, “Most organizations focus on destinations or in rescuing girls who have been trafficked and then prosecuting the offender. What’s unique about this NGO is that they focus on identifying villages most at risk of girls being trafficked and we are using big data and technology to help solve this problem”.

Quantium and My Choice Foundation are using advanced analytics application to leverage crime and government data to predict when and where traffickers are likely to strike next.

For Operation Red Alert, Quantium analyzed data while constantly refining and iterating to define a model that could identify villages most at risk. The Aussie firm’s big data solution runs on Cisco UCS infrastructure and uses the MapR Converged Data Platform to analyze data from varied sources — census data, government education data and other sources such proximity to transportation stations, population and distance to police stations to identify the villages most at risk.

According to Simon Reid, Group Executive for Technology at Quantium. “For example, with the analytics for Operation Red Alert we’re fine-tuning the algorithm, adding more hypothesis and more granular data to improve our predictive capabilities. MapR adds performance security and the ability to segregate multiple data sets from multiple data partners for Operation Red Alert.”

The Australian firm upgraded its legacy server platform with Cisco  UCS to gain centralized management and the computing power required to process complex algorithms in dense, scalable form factor that also reduces power consumption.

Tech savvy NGO banks on data for positive results

Elca Grobler, founder of the My Choices Foundation has always believed in leveraging technology to better lives. And this is where Quantium helps the Foundation in mapping out at-risk areas and following a more targeted approach. “We’re adding data and refining our predictive analytics, while expanding our education efforts to cover more states this year,” said Grobler in a statement. The Hyderabad based NGO is also the first to highlight the issue of human trafficking cases with a short film that uses VR technology. Titled Notes to My Father — the world’s first virtual reality (VR) on sex trafficking is about a young country girl who is married off by her father and subsequently trafficked into a brothel. The Hyderabad based teamed up with Oculus, leading US virtual reality firm to make the film.