UPRoar Tools by Data4Change and Small Media Foundation

UPRoar Tools is an interactive and exploratory tool that gives human rights activists supercharged data insights to help them conduct more effective advocacy at the United Nations.

Designed and built by Data4Change in partnership with Small Media, UPRoar Tools is powered by more than 80,000 rows of data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a human rights process that gives UN member states the opportunity to openly criticise each other's human rights track records. It can get feisty!

It’s no secret that conducting advocacy at a UN level can be very complicated and too costly for many human rights activists around the world. UPRoar Tools was created in order to demystify the UPR process and democratise the use of data in UN advocacy so that every human rights activist can use the power of data to defend human rights. It deliberately looks and feels nothing like a UN data tool, and aims to make data-driven advocacy more accessible and fun than ever before!

Its ‘country profiles’ include top-level stats and an advocacy timeline for each UN member state so that users can keep track of what advocacy tasks are needed and when for each UN member state.

The ‘matchmaker’ crunches big data to help human rights activists identify the best countries to target with their advocacy so that they can more effectively achieve their advocacy goals.

With that intel to hand, the next step is the ‘recommendation builder’, a chatbot interface built on a dataset created by natural language processing to take user inputs and transform them into fully fledged UPR recommendations language written in UN-appropriate language.

In order to do these tasks in the past a human rights activist or organisation would have to spend a significant amount of time, effort and money.

The data feeding the UPRoar Tools is accessed via an API of the UN’s Universal Human Rights Index database. If you’re curious to find out more about how the tool works watch this video.