Ethical-Tech-CoLab/after-the-corridor-report

After the Corridor: from AI-informed evacuation to digital public goods for refugee economic inclusion — an Ethical Tech CoLab research report, grounded at Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi # After the Corridor **From AI-Informed Evacuation to Digital Public Goods for Refugee Economic Inclusion** Ethical Tech CoLab · NYU Center for Global Affairs · Research report · July 2026 📄 **Read the report online** · Download the PDF · Markdown source --- How can AI inform evacuation decisions, and what happens after? This report reads the Ethical Tech CoLab's five fielded evacuation prototypes and its forced-labour risk index together, states plainly which of them are validated and which are not, and extends the arc past the corridor and into the camp: the measurement, financial-modeling, and rights infrastructure that can shorten protracted displacement and improve lives. The case study ground is **Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Dowa District, Malawi**, where humanitarian financing has collapsed while an encampment policy bars residents from working. It also names the one thing the lab refuses to build, biometric identity for displaced people, and argues that the refusal is itself a public good. ## The argument in four figures | | | | --- | --- | | **6** | built instruments: five fielded evacuation prototypes and a completed forced-labour risk index, all open source | | **53,000+** | people now at Dzaleka, a camp built in 1994 for 10,000 to 12,000 | | **90%** | cut to UNHCR's Malawi budget, from about US$8 million to about US$1 million | | **0** | biometric identity systems, recorded as a versioned decision pattern (DDC-0001) rather than left implicit | ## Three registers, kept apart A reader deciding whether to fund this work is owed precision about maturity, so the report never lets a claim exceed the register of the tool it describes. | Register | Components | | --- | --- | | Built and validated | Evacuation Risk and Cost Framework (ERCF), in its evacuation form | | Built and operational, not yet validated | Evacuation Information Index (EII), Exodus, Evacuation Behavior Simulator, Readiness and Uncertainty Simulator | | Built and completed, published met …