UN Photo/Elma Okic Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Doreen Bogdan-Martin speaks at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva. (file)
AI for Good: How the UN uses AI to advance human rights
For Ari, a six-year-old boy with learning difficulties in Jamaica, artificial intelligence (AI) opened the door to something many children take for granted: reading a book in his own language. Thousands of miles away, gold miners in Ethiopia are being screened more quickly for tuberculosis, while communities around the world are breathing cleaner air thanks to faster detection of methane leaks.
Across agencies, the UN is implementing AI tools to help promote peace, security and human rights while spearheading the global conversation around AI governance.
By the book
Six-year-old Ari in Jamaica has learning difficulties which make it difficult for him to study, but now AI technology is converting existing textbooks into interactive formats personalised to his needs.
“The real impact is what this means for children,” Pia Rebello Britto, UNICEF’s Global Director of Education and Adolescent Development, told UN News. “There are countless more examples like Ari’s, showing what becomes possible when digital learning is designed to reach every child.”
For UNICEF, implementing AI means putting the communities it supports at the centre of its technology development process.
The agency worked with advocacy groups to design its Accessible Digital Textbooks for All (ADT) initiative, which tackles a persistent barrier in global education: inaccessible learning materials for the nearly 240 million children worldwide living with disabilities.
While the programme existed before AI’s rapid rise, today’s AI-assisted version now operates in 17 countries, reaching nearly two million children, with a goal of expanding to 50 countries by 2030. Six countries have already joined this year.
Putting a brake on methane
“Fifteen years after independence, South Sudan is at one of its most dangerous points,” the Commission said, noting that “rushing to elections” without essential safeguards risks deepening existing conflicts and increasing the risk of the atrocity crimes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
In 2018, the country’s warring parties committed to a revitalized peace deal (the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS). Today, almost half of its key provisions have not been implemented, including the unification of the country’s security forces.
Instead, South Sudan’s people must now endure a “worsening political, security, humanitarian and human rights situation” marked by a return of political division and conflict-related abuses, the Commissioners maintained.
The panel is an independent body created by and reporting to the UN Human Rights Council, which convenes Member States in Geneva.
Established in March 2016, the Commission has been renewed annually ever since, highlighting grave international concern over the dire situation for South Sudan’s people.
The commissioners are Yasmin Sooka, Barney Afako and Carlos Castresana Fernández. Each is a senior expert in human rights law and international law. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work as Commissioners.
TB screening
With assistance from the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), developing countries are using AI to analyse chest X-rays for signs of tuberculosis (TB), allowing faster screenings in areas with fewer specialists.
“It’s really helping people to move through the sort of diagnostic cascade onto treatment much sooner,” Dr. Vanessa Veronese, a scientist at the WHO’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, told UN News.
Earlier diagnosis also means fewer infectious people in the community, reducing onward transmission – a crucial step towards eliminating TB.
Dr. Veronese pointed to Ethiopia, where gold miners face an increased risk of contracting TB due to dust and silica exposure.
The technology behind early diagnosis is called computer-aided detection (CAD).
Chief among CAD’s benefits is that it generates a TB likelihood score very quickly, helping overstretched radiologists in low-resource settings, which is important because many die from TB if they do not receive treatment.
In 2021, the WHO officially recommended its use to screen for TB in adults and has since supported developing countries in adopting the technology. WHO provides practical implementation guidance, helps TB programmes calibrate the software and studies health outcomes.
“It really does help overcome these historical barriers around skilled personnel, access, cost, availability – all of these access barriers that prohibit good health,” Dr. Veronese told UN News.
Advancing crisis response
UN agencies are also using AI to detect land mines, assess disaster damage, identify suspicious financial transactions, monitor radioactive contamination and accelerate nuclear fusion research.
But as technology advances, the UN is emphasising equity, human rights and ethics to ensure AI promotes development instead of threatening peace and democracy.
Mr. Guterres has called AI “humanity’s greatest opportunity in the 21st century” and “one of its greatest risks,” stressing the need for inclusive oversight.
“We must ensure AI serves humanity, and not the other way around,” he said.