Bridging Technology And Policy
Rebeca Moreno Jiménez MPA ’15 has always identified with migrants.
Born and raised in Mexico, Moreno Jiménez straddled two worlds. Her paternal grandmother was from Chiapas in southeastern Mexico and spoke an indigenous language; her mother’s family was Spanish-speaking and from northern Mexico. Her family eventually ended up in Ensenada, near the California border.
The family was middle class, but, in 1994, when Moreno Jiménez was 10, they were evicted from their house during Mexico’s peso crisis (often referred to as the “Tequila Crisis”). They found themselves in what she calls “urban poverty.” “It was a very traumatic experience for my family not being able to pay your rent and then you’re out of the house,” she says.
The experience shaped Moreno Jiménez’s worldview and work ethic.
“I think that’s why I care very much about migration issues, because besides being a migrant myself here in Switzerland, I’ve been a migrant for a lot of time internally [in Mexico],” she says from her office in Geneva, where she is the innovation officer and lead data scientist at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
She received a nearly full scholarship to Tecnológico de Monterrey, where she earned a BA in international relations and an MPP. After a stint at the World Bank in Mexico City as a public information officer, Moreno Jiménez received a Fulbright Scholarship, which led her to SIPA.
At Columbia she quickly charted her own course.
“Everything that I was doing at the beginning was statistics, macroeconomics, microeconomics— all the core courses,” she says. “And then I took the Applied Peacebuilding class.” A class project led her to Uganda, where she worked with GAPS Uganda, a grassroots nonprofit organization committed to advocating for transitional justice and the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. She helped the NGO improve Uganda’s early warning and response (EWR) efforts to prevent violence.
The experience transformed not only her time at SIPA but also her career path.
“I came back, and I was in another reality,” she says about her newfound love for melding technology and humanitarian work. “This is what I want to do. I don’t know how to, but I really want to help.”
Moreno Jiménez met with her professor — Eugenia “Jenny” McGill MIA ’00, director of the Economic and Political Development concentration — to essentially create a custom curriculum at the intersection of peacebuilding and data science.
“I think Professor McGill was worried about me—‘I don’t know what’s happening with your curriculum,’” she recalls McGill saying, worried that Moreno Jiménez would not fulfill her requirements. “I [said], ‘Trust me on this one.’ I started to be very, very adept at seeing things that are related to technology and emerging tech at SIPA.” She also designed her own Capstone workshop supporting Syrian refugees in Jordan.
“Our most successful Capstone workshop projects are often those that students help design,” McGill says. “That was certainly the case in the 2014–15 project with the World Food Programme in Jordan, which Rebeca initiated with a Jordanian classmate.”
“The flexibility of SIPA allowed me to do that,” Moreno Jiménez says.
Moreno Jiménez made the most of her time at SIPA, participating in student groups like the Latin American Student Association (LASA), being a finalist in the SIPA Dean’s Public Policy Challenge with her team’s startup, and serving as a volunteer for New York City’s participatory budgeting process. She estimates that she attended over 300 events both on and off campus during her two years in New York.
After graduation in 2015, Moreno Jiménez ended up at UNHCR as its first ever female data scientist and has been there ever since. Her work leverages data science, big data, and AI to enhance protection and decision-making in the humanitarian sector across the globe.
“The problem in humanitarian settings is that the data quality is not good,” she says. “In some places, we don’t even have what we call ‘humanitarian access,’ meaning our colleagues cannot enter that zone because it’s a war zone. So we don’t really know how many people sometimes are in need of our assistance.”
Moreno Jiménez and her team often rely on the “triple nexus”— the collaboration between humanitarian, development, and peace actors— to gather, share, and analyze data. With the advent of AI, humanitarian agencies like UNHCR are having to quickly adapt.
“For the humanitarian sector, it’s adapting our standard operating procedures and policies— all the human rights legal frameworks, the right to nondiscrimination, the right to avoid bias, et cetera— to AI and all the emerging technology,” she says. “So that actually comes from my SIPA background because I’m a hybrid in the agency” at the intersection of technology and policy.
Moreno Jiménez’s accomplishments and citations in the field are many, but she is especially proud of Project Jetson. Developed by her team at UNHCR’s Innovation Service, Jetson is a machine learning–based app that provides predictive analytics about population movements in specific regions of countries and has had lifesaving results in Somalia and Brazil.
UNHCR estimates that as of May, 120 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide, so Moreno Jiménez’s team is in even greater demand. Today she spends less time in the field and more time managing data projects from Geneva, speaking at conferences, and publishing her research.
“The privilege of being in UNHCR’s headquarters is the teams that you work with,” she says. “It could be Korea in the morning, and then in the afternoon, Paraguay telling you another thing. I absorb the knowledge through them. They’re the real innovators, actually; I just facilitate their ideas and projects.”
In many ways it’s like her time at SIPA, where she absorbed every aspect of being a student and a citizen of New York City.
“I’m a hyper person, and I think New York just fit me perfectly,” she says. “I’ll take advantage of everything.”