Re:Iraq
About the CSO
The Iraqi Observatory of Human Rights (IOHR) is a voluntary and independent non-governmental organisation that monitors and documents human rights violations in Iraq. It mainly consists of lawyers and journalists.
The team
From left to right: Hammoud (designer, Egypt), Amira (data researcher, Egypt), Caio (developer, Brazil), Omar (researcher, Jordan), Skye (information designer, USA), Murooj (CSO rep, Iraq), Hussam (CSO rep, Iraq)
About the topic
There is more than 500,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Iraq due to the number of conflicts that have raged inside the country over the past decade. But the re-homing of IDPs is slow and complicated. The rebuilding of homes is taking a long time as is the government’s efforts of issuing passes for people to return home, resulting in thousands of people being stranded in refugee camps.
A look at the data
The data IOHR had was stuck in PDFs and handwritten reports so the team spent a lot of time collecting, scraping, cleaning and analysing their data and case studies. The team also had to do a datadive to find supplementary data from IOM and UNHCR.
Their objectives
IOHR wanted to raise awareness of the issue internationally to put pressure on the Iraqi government to improve their approval process of issuing returning home passes to families as well to ensure that they are more transparent when it comes to spendings (the Iraqi government has been accused of corruption when it comes to spending of international aid for IDPs). Their aim with the campaign is thus to visualise the scale of the issue of IDPs, humanise the stories hidden in the data, raise awareness about the issue internationally and to put international pressure on the Iraqi government to improve its practises concerning IDPs, including fiscal transparency. Their key target audience for this campaign is international journalists, NGOs and policy makers.
ResultsAt the end of the workshop the team had created a working prototype of an interactive website called Re:Iraq, it is powered by Google Sheets.
After the workshop the team worked together to do user testing and refined the design and completed the content creation (timeline, interviews with IDPs) and the development of the website, which is available in both Arabic and English. Below are some of the original designs created at the sprint.
