Last fall, Hania Zataari, a mechanical engineer who works for Lebanon’s Ministry of Industry, put her skills to use as war raged in the country. Originally from Sidon, South Lebanon, she created a chatbot on WhatsApp that simplified access to much-needed help.
“They lost their houses, their savings, their jobs, everything they had built,” Hania says, referring to those forced from their homes by the war.
On September 23, Israel dramatically escalated its offensive against the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, with whom it has been fighting a spiraling conflict since Hezbollah attacked Israel in October 2023.
According to the Lebanese government, at least 492 people were killed in one of the deadliest days of conflict in Lebanon in nearly 20 years.
Thousands of families fled to Sidon after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) hit what it said were 1,600 Hezbollah strongholds inside Lebanon.
Hania says many displaced people sought refuge in schools and other public buildings, but many others who fled their homes were forced to rent them elsewhere or stay with family members.
She wanted to help those people who did not directly receive support from the state. Drawing on her programming skills, Hania created an “aidbot” to bridge the gap between demand and supply of aid.
Aidbot is a chatbot – a type of AI system designed to communicate with its users online – that connects to WhatsApp. It is programmed to ask simple questions about the types of help people need along with their names and locations.
This information is then entered into a Google spreadsheet that Hania and her team of unpaid volunteers, made up of friends and family, access to distribute aid such as food, blankets, mattresses, medicine and clothing.
Hania used her free time to build a bot using the website Callbell.eu, which is commonly used by companies to interact with customers on Meta’s platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
She explains that the bot, which is still in use today, makes aid distribution more efficient by reducing the time she spends responding to requests for help via WhatsApp.
“I don’t really care about their names. I just need to know where they are so I can manage the delivery,” she says.
Take, for example, a request for infant formula. Hania says the bot will ask for the baby’s age and the amount needed so she and her team can provide it.
The project, he says, is financed by donations from Lebanese living abroad. She created a publicly available dashboard to record what the project spent money on and how much aid she and her team distributed.
At the time of writing, they have delivered 78 food packages to families of 5 or 10 people, 900 mattresses and 323 blankets throughout Sidon and other parts of Lebanon.
Last October, 47-year-old Khaldoun Abbas and his family fled their homes in Najjarieh after receiving a call from the IDF urging them to leave for their own safety.
Seventeen people, aged nine to 78, slept under the same roof in a rented three-bed apartment in Sidon.
Khaldoun says he, his wife and their children, as well as his brother’s family, slept on mattresses they searched for with the aidbot in the hallway of the apartment. They also requested blankets, food and cleaning detergents.
Unlike his neighbors, he was unable to return to his home. It was destroyed in a confirmed Israeli attack 11 days later. The IDF told the BBC it had “struck a terrorist infrastructure”.
When we put this claim to Khaldoun, he denied any connection to Hezbollah or any other party.
“This is not the first time that Sidon has opened its doors to displaced people,” explains Hania, referring to the wave of people who arrived in the city.
Sidon has a long-standing reputation for hosting internally displaced people who have been driven from their homes along the Lebanese-Israeli border.
The latest conflict began in October 2023 after the war between Israel and Hamas spilled over into Lebanon when Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, fired rockets into Israel in support of Gaza.
Lebanon’s health ministry says nearly 4,000 people have been killed and more than a million displaced. The ministry does not specify how many civilians or combatants are among them.
In Israel, about 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel, and authorities say more than 80 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed.
A ceasefire was agreed between Israel and Lebanon last November. Despite some conflicts, it is mostly supported. But people on the ground say aid delivery has not improved.
International NGO Islamic Relief told the BBC that “conflict, destruction and evacuation orders have fueled ongoing displacement in Lebanon, making it difficult to assess and address the needs of the population amid a changing situation.”
But it is not only the war that hinders the distribution of aid.
Bilal Merie, a volunteer who works with Hania, says many of the problems they face are caused by a “high demand but lack” of help.
He attributes this to the deep economic turmoil that has gripped the country since 2019, meaning the Lebanese government has had to rely heavily on financing from creditors and aid organizations for goods.
But even non-governmental organizations feel the crisis. Unicef Lebanon says that with only 20% of the funding it needs, it “continues to face a huge funding gap”, meaning the charity is unable to support families when they need it most.
In a country wracked by financial problems and war, can this aidbot make a tangible difference?
This is the first time researcher John Bryant of the think tank Overseas Development Institute has heard of a chatbot being used in such a way in the humanitarian sector.
He says that the cultural context in which it is used is for praise. That is, with knowledge of “the channels people use to talk to each other and get to know them in their own language.”
However, he is not sure about its scalability, as what works in Lebanon cannot be easily replicated in other parts of the world.
“What technology offers most of the time is a standard cookie-cutter approach.
“Local designers, local translators, reliable human interlocutors and elements within that system elevate digital tools into something useful,” he says.
Aidbot may not be able to offer a solution to all of Lebanon’s problems, but it has made life a little easier for the families who use it.
Additional reporting by Ahmed Abdallah
