case-studies

A production application to support survivors of human trafficking

DrivenData developed Freedom Lifemap, a digital tool designed to support survivors of human trafficking on their journey toward reintegration and independence

The organization

EverFree develops and scales transformative solutions to end human trafficking so that all people can thrive in freedom and dignity. EverFree provides comprehensive, effective care for survivors of exploitation, and unites partners and communities to measure impact, improve care, and stop exploitation.

The challenge

As of 2021, an estimated 50 million people worldwide were living in modern slavery, forced to work or marry against their will. EverFree sought to rapidly develop a production version of Freedom Lifemap (FLM), a research-backed, participant-centered tool for survivors to assess their strengths and vulnerabilities using 49 indicators across the six areas of well-being that define freedom. The application had to provide a scalable solution, enabling service providers to offer personalized and holistic care across a broad spectrum of needs, from counseling to employment services.

The approach

Leveraging our expertise in building secure, data-driven platforms, we worked closely with EverFree to define essential features for launch. These included user management, secure data sharing, and holistic tracking of survivors' progress. The application was built using Django for its robust backend capabilities and Vue.js on the frontend to handle real-time updates and lightweight interactivity, ensuring a smooth and responsive user experience. The application also provides offline functionality for survey facilitation—designed to be simple, robust, and automatic—which enables facilitators to use FLM in more remote areas without the risk of data loss. Modern branding and straightforward interface provide a clean, user-friendly experience.

Example lifemap for a participant. Fake data is shown to protect participant privacy.

The results

DrivenData did an outstanding job building our Freedom LifeMap platform, providing us with innovative solutions to visualize complex data and track survivor pathways. Their expertise and dedication were invaluable in creating a tool that enhances our impact and helps us better support vulnerable populations.

Katie Rootlieb, Chief Operating Officer, EverFree

Today, EverFree’s Freedom Lifemap technology connects survivors with individualized care and strengthens organizations with data to guide and improve programs, measure outcomes, and stop exploitation. Working with survivors, case workers use the assessment to identify priorities and develop individualized care plans. Since the launch of the new platform in August 2024, over 1,700 assessments have been conducted for over 1,500 survivors and nearly 200 users across 23 organizations are actively using the tool.

Our real-world impact

All projects
Partners: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Arcus Foundation, WILDLABS

Automating wildlife identification for research and conservation

Detected wildlife in images and videos—automatically and at scale—by building the winning algorithm from a DrivenData competition into an open source python package and a web application running models in the cloud.

Partners: Private sector, social sector

Building LLM solutions

Built solutions using LLMs for multiple real-world applications, across tasks including semantic search, summarization, named entity recognition, and multimodal analysis. Work has spanned research on state-of-the-art models tuned for specific use cases to production ready retrieval-augmented AI applications.

Partners: The World Bank, The Conflict and Environment Observatory

Identifying crop types using satellite imagery in Yemen

Used satellite imagery to identify crop extent, crop types and climate risks to agriculture in Yemen, informing World Bank development programs in the country after years of civil war.

Partners: IDEO.org

Illuminating mobile money experiences in Tanzania

Analyzed millions of mobile money records to uncover patterns in behavior, and then combined these insights with human-centered design to shape new approaches to delivering mobile money to low-income populations in Tanzania.

Partners: Insecurity Insight, Physicians for Human Rights

Tracking attacks on health care in Ukraine

Built a real-time, interactive map to visualize attacks on the Ukrainian health care system since the Russian invasion began in February of 2022. The map will support partner efforts to provide aid, hold aggressors accountable in court, and increase public awareness.

Partners: CABI Plantwise

Mining chat messages with plant doctors using language models

Automated recognition of agricultural entities (such as crops, pests, diseases, and chemicals) in WhatsApp and Telegram messages among plant doctors, enabling new ways to surface emerging trends and improve science-based guidance for smallholder farmers.

Partners: NASA

Monitoring water quality from satellite imagery

Created an open-source package to detect harmful algal blooms using machine learning and satellite imagery. Included running a machine-learning competition, conducting end user interviews, and engineering a robust, deployable pipeline.

Partners: Data science company foundation

Matching students with schools where they are likely to succeed

Used machine learning to match students with higher education programs where they are more likely to get in and graduate based on their unique profile, with a focus on backgrounds traditionally less likely to attend college or apply to more competitive programs.

Partners: Fair Trade USA

Mapping fair trade products from source to shelf

Visualized the flow of fair trade coffee products from the farms where they are grown to the stores where they are sold, connecting the nodes in supply chain transactions and increasing transparency for customers and auditors.

Partners: The World Bank, Angaza, GOGLA, Lighting Global

Developing performance indicators and repayment models in off-grid solar

Analyzed repayment behaviors across dozens of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar energy companies serving off-grid populations throughout Africa, and developed KPIs to facilitate standardized reporting for PAYG portfolios.

Partners: Haystack Informatics

Modeling patient pathways through hospitals

Mapped out the probabilistic patient journeys through hospitals based on tens of thousands of patient experiences, giving hospitals a better view into the timing of the activities in their departments and how they relate to operational efficiency.

Partners: Yelp, Harvard University, City of Boston

Predicting public health risks from restaurant reviews

Flagged public health risks at restaurants by combining Yelp reviews with open city data on past inspections. An algorithmic approach discovers 25% more violations with the same number of inspections.

Partners: Education Resource Strategies

Smart auto-tagging of K-12 school spending

Built algorithms that put apples-to-apples labels on school budget line items so that districts understand how their spending stacks up and where they can improve, saving months of manual processing each year.

Partners: Love Justice

Building data tools to fight human trafficking in Nepal

Aided anti-trafficking efforts at border crossings and airports by combining data across locations and surfacing insights that give interviewers greater intelligence about the right questions to ask and how to direct them.

Partners: GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer

Putting AI into the hands of lung cancer clinicians

Translated advances in machine learning research to practical software for clinical settings, building an open source application through a new kind of data challenge.

Partners: Microsoft

Driving data education through custom competitions

Developed online, white-label data science competitions for students to synthesize their learnings and test their skills on applied challenges. Each capstone features a real-world dataset that focuses on an important issue in the social sector.

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