What Siraj Teaches Us About Digital Resilience in Conflict
A new case study documents how our Siraj partnership project helped Yemeni youth push back against scams, misinformation, and other digital harms through trusted local leadership.
When we think of conflict zones, we may visualize shelling, gunfire and families fleeing home. We’re less likely to think about what arrives through a phone screen. But digital harms are now central to the threat landscape — spreading fear, distorting reality, and targeting people at their most vulnerable.
Take Yemen, where people are living through one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Here, digital harms take many forms: misinformation that undermines trust in aid, scams that exploit precarity, harmful speech that deepens division, and digital attacks on people already living under immense strain.
That’s the context for Siraj, a 2021-23 pilot initiative that empowered Yemeni youth to resist digital harms. Although Siraj wrapped three years ago, it is the subject of a new case study by Grand Challenges Canada (GCC).**
This case study documents the model SecDev built alongside the Sheba Youth Foundation in Yemen’s besieged city of Taiz. At its heart were several dozen trained local youth champions. Backed by training and support, they worked together to flag emerging digital harms in local channels — from disinformation to scams — and develop community-rooted response campaigns.
The logo: “Siraj” sounds an Arabic word meaning light or lantern.
Across 18 months, Siraj reached nearly 500,000 people through 64 awareness-raising activities and 49 localized Arabic-language resources. GCC’s case study summarizes the results: measurable shifts in how communities recognized and responded to digital threats, and growing trust in Siraj as a source of support. One campaign may even have helped shut down a noxious click-farm operation. The case study also traces how Sheba increasingly assumed leadership for the initiative and became a recognized Yemeni voice on digital resilience — an all-new area for this community organization.
**Grand Challenges Canada is part of a consortium of partners that funded Siraj through an initiative called Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge. The other partners are Global Affairs Canada and the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
Learning from the experience
The Yemeni context is more than a backdrop. It is part of what makes the case study worth reading closely. Internet blackouts, shifting front lines, political repression, and an overstretched humanitarian system all make sustained behavioural change harder to achieve. So it’s worth examining what enabled meaningful scale under those conditions.
SalamaTech also provided vital threat intelligence, tracking malicious actors in Syria who were using proven attack methods against Yemeni targets. Siraj drew on SalamaTech’s expertise to rapidly localize 16 learning resources addressing online gender-based violence. Together, these and other contributions effectively transformed a veteran Syrian model into a rapid response mechanism adapted to Yemen’s conflict environment.
Just as important, Siraj was built for local ownership from the start. Its platform and resources passed into Sheba’s control by design, and youth champions have continued working through their own networks beyond the life of the pilot. That continuity did not happen by accident. It reflects a model designed to leave capability, trust, and practical tools in local hands.
For funders, the takeaway is not just that Siraj worked. It is why. Sheba could move quickly by drawing on earlier investment in Arabic-language resources — and because local ownership was integral to the design. Short-term grants can help test an approach, but they are rarely enough to sustain one. Durable digital safety work requires realistic overhead, support for local partners, and multi-year backing that treats local ownership as a design feature rather than an aspiration.
For implementers and policy actors, the implication is equally clear. Community-led, behaviour-focused responses to digital harms should not be optional add-ons to humanitarian programming. In crisis settings, where trust is fragile and vulnerability is high, this kind of digital resilience is core protection work. It belongs there because the ability to live, organize, seek help, and rebuild increasingly depends on navigating digital spaces safely.
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Read the case study (PDF, 5MB)
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Siraj youth champions strategizing. (Photo: Sheba Youth Foundation, Taiz, Yemen.)
