Space for Safeguarding of Children

The intended Invitation to Tender (ITT) investigates the opportunities for innovative and sustainable space-enabled solutions that support the safeguarding of children and young people across the globe. It will investigate the integration of space data and technology with complementary data derived from digital and terrestrial sources to tackle the issues stated below, addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals 16.2 and 10.7 through sustainable services.

Protecting children from abuse and exploitation is a societal imperative that is entrenched in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and in the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.2: “End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children”. However, it is a global – and often silent – epidemic. It happens in every country and every community and across all cultural and socio-economic contexts. According to studies, one in two children experiences violence every year, totalling one billion children across the globe.

In the case of the safety of migratory children, their wellbeing is also pursued by SDG 10.7: “Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.” Migratory children face additional threats beyond abuse and exploitation, including a lack of basic human necessities such as proper nutrition, healthcare, shelter, and water on their journey to their destination country.

The challenge

There is a global need to improve existing tools and develop new ones to identify and address the issue of missing children. The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), as well as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), have identified room for improvement of such tools. ICMEC has developed their own case management, communication, and public alerting platform for use by law enforcement and other organisations to help them locate missing children.

This opportunity is supported by ICMEC, which has provided use cases and will support resultant activities by providing user requirements and recommendations towards establishing sustainable space-based services for the safeguarding of children.

The topics of relevance identified are:

Protecting migrant children: especially important for humanitarian institutions, given that children on the move face a greater chance of abuse and exploitation. Unaccompanied children are often left in a protracted state of vulnerability and can easily fall victim to abuse and exploitation. It is essential that authorities and NGOs know the routes taken by migrants so that they can provide comprehensive assistance to migrants ‒ not only to combat abuse and exploitation, but also to provide basic human needs.

Missing children: children may flee their homes for a variety of reasons following trauma, including surviving violence and exploitation, witnessing and experiencing abuse, being victims of human trafficking, or even being exposed to armed conflict. Once an unaccompanied child is on their own, they often rely on traffickers due to restrictive border enforcements between their home country and destination/transit countries, who may expose them to further exploitation and/ or kidnapping. One of the biggest barriers to identifying trafficked children is the availability of dependable, timely, spatially explicit and scalable data on trafficking activity. However, by using spatiotemporal information of missing populations, it is possible to predict the locations of missing persons on a large scale.

How space technology can help

Space technology may help with these, primarily through the use of earth observation data.

Change detection paired with call records and social media data can be used to undertake trend estimation techniques to provide indicators on suspicious areas to be monitored and prompt further analysis. This would be useful in and around national borders to highlight potential areas and/or routes used for trafficking.

Likewise, Earth observation change detection can be paired with machine learning techniques to determine ‘patterns of life’ over time, i.e. to identify when unusual activities take place relative to the normal or expected use of a given site.

Very-high resolution (VHR) imagery can be used to characterise elements such as land-use, building types, and population density. This information can be utilised as proxies or areas of interest regarding permanent places that could harbour children forced into exploitation.

Hot spot analysis could correlate movements of people embarking or disembarking on ships that spoof or hide their own automatic identification system (AIS) signals. Such ships could harbour trafficked children. Radio frequency (RF) analytics that identify potential RF emitters along a migration route may also be leveraged to support in identification of unusual patterns, which is useful in the planning of delivering comprehensive assistance to migrants.

Global navigation satellite systems may be useful for the tracking of relevant persons and/or to support frontline responder units., and satellite communications could be used in remote locations or for redundant communications in remote regions, or those with unreliable connectivity, or subject to intentional/unintentional interference.

Who can apply?

We look for promising business ideas addressing the topics of relevance or related areas that propose:

• Sustainable service concepts
• Technically feasible solutions
• Added value of space data or technology
• Motivated teams with commercial, technical, and domain expertise

Feasibility Studies explore the sustainability potential and technical viability of new applications and services that exploit one or more space assets (e.g. satellite communications, satellite navigation, Earth observation, spaceflight technology spinouts). Feasibility Studies should evaluate the technical and economic sustainability potential of the service but have the objective of eventual development, demonstration and operational provision of the service investigated thereafter (if proven viable).

To be eligible for funding, your team must be based in one of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland. Teams can involve non-European entities, but their contribution to the activity cannot be funded by ESA. Authorisation of Funding letters from the corresponding National Delegations are required as part of the application.

If you would like help to find a collaboration partner, or with contacting the UK’s National Delegation, please contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Space team.