Human Rights Day: innovating for equality

What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

On the 10th of December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a groundbreaking document that laid out a broad set of fundamental human rights and freedoms. As the Declaration establishes, these inalienable rights apply to every individual around the world, regardless of gender, nationality, religion, ethnic origin, or any other status. Specific rights mentioned in the document include freedom from torture, equal treatment before the law, right to seek asylum, and freedom of expression, among many others.

Following the horrors of the Second World War and the human rights abuses that occurred during the conflict, the Declaration was signed to try and prevent these kinds of atrocities from being repeated, ensuring freedom, justice, and peace for all. Although the Declaration itself is non-binding, it has inspired the creation and adoption of a multitude of international, regional, and national human rights treaties and other legally binding instruments. The rights set out in the Declaration also form the backbone of the Sustainable Development Goals, with over 90 per cent of SDG targets overlapping with human rights obligations.

Human Rights Day

To celebrate the historic document and everything it represents, the UN formally named the 10th of December as Human Rights Day. The theme of this year’s day is: Our Rights, Our Future, Right Now, with a continued focus on highlighting how human rights act as a pathway to solutions and a transformative force for good. To mark the occasion, we’ve compiled five of our favourite human rights solutions from the Springwise Library. Take a look.

Solutions to protect human rights

A role-playing game tackles discrimination

MIT scientists are currently using big data to build a platform for halting race-based inequitable policies and services. Called the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism, the cross-disciplinary programme brings together research from all areas of life – including healthcare, housing, sustainability, and gaming. Working with Caglar Yildirim , a research scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) , D. Fox Harrell designed a virtual reality role-playing game called On the Plane. AI enables an interactive narrative engine that changes the game as players adapt their behaviours, helping participants better understand the many ways in which xenophobia can be expressed and how it may feel to be a recipient of such behaviour. Read more

Prefab interim housing tackles homelessness

Affordable housing continues to be inaccessible for many people around the world, not least in the US. As a result, in California alone, around 186,000 people currently live either on the streets or in homeless shelters. Without reliable access to electricity, plumbing, and the Internet, it can be extremely difficult for people living on the streets to get back on track while they wait for permanent housing. Wanting to provide unhoused individuals with a safe, clean, and empowering “waiting room”, California-based non-profit DignityMoves created a programme of interim supportive housing: temporary communities where individuals can get back on their feet. Read more

A creative platform for displaced young people

Unicef estimates that 13.7 million refugee or asylum-seeking children were displaced by the end of 2021. Even once safely relocated, most of these children continue to face ongoing difficulties and harm, including prejudicial treatment from those in the host country. Created by Ahmed M. Badr, Ed.M. in the form of an online blog detailing his experiences as a refugee and Iraqi-American, Narratio is a creative online platform that encourages young people from disenfranchised groups to tell their stories and get their voices heard. Read more

A solar microgrid fuels free legal services

Power insecurity or energy poverty affects around two billion people across the world today. BarefootLaw , a scheme in Uganda, provides free legal aid to people in rural communities, but energy intermittence often means the headquarters has to shut down for days at a time. To fix this, the non-profit sought help from the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) . SELF has developed the ‘Justice Microgrid’, a 14.25-kilowatt solar-electric mini-grid to provide BarefootLaw with the reliable energy it needs to continue its valuable work, even when the local area experiences power cuts. Read more

A blockchain education passport empowers refugees

According to figures from the UNHCR, as of 2022 there were some 35.3 million refugees around the world. Many, if not most, of these people lost access to vital personal documents, such as graduation or training certificates, when they fled. To solve this problem, Italian Researcher and Designer Giorgia Maria Malandrino developed a universal system for validating university work called Geoidentity . The digital passport would contain personal and academic data and be validated using the blockchain. The borderless platform would allow students to provide all their data to any host university in the world. Read more

If you want to be inspired by more positive-impact innovations, why not have a browse of the Springwise Innovation Library?