Mobile phone services help refugees find families
Refugees who have become separated from family during war and disasters can now use a mobile phone web service to try to find them again. Around 200,000 refugees are expected to use the site.
The technology has been developed by a not for profit organisation called Refugees United and is funded by a $3.8 million grant from the IKEA foundation.
Christopher Mikkelsen is the director of Refugees United. He says the new service offered is substantially different to what has been on offer in the past: “Prior to this, it was done by pen and paper. You didn’t get data captured across conflicts and across borders. Now people can check themselves. A lot of people are signing up because of work done by our partner organisations – the UNHCR, the Kenyan Red Cross for example.”
He says that in a world that is often talked as more connected than ever, refugees are often forgotten: “I can tell you about 43 million people who are as unconnected as can be, they don’t have the luxury of checking online to see what their friend had for breakfast, they are trying to find out where there brother or sister is.”
The service already has 50,000 registered users, mainly people who have fled the Congo, Somalia and Sudan but who are now living in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. One in two refugees living in camps has a mobile phone and the development of the project includes awareness raising through aid workers in the field. The organisers hope to register 200,000 people, making it more likely that they will bring missing family members together.
Success story
In August 2011, in the world’s largest refugee camp, Dabaab in Kenya, a Somali woman was reunited with her two daughters who she had not seen in 18 years. They had travelled with their father to Switzerland, where the younger of the two had then emigrated to the United States. Within an hour of being helped online by a group working in the camp, the woman had found one of her daughters.
The typical user is someone who has had a chaotic and difficult journey to safety. “Right now we see a lot of Somali refugees who have fled the drought” Christopher Mikkelsen explains: “half the family stay in Mogadishu then half way through the journey the parents split up, each taking half the children. Then the family back in Mogadishu leave to find somewhere safer. In that flow, information about how to find each other gets lost. So we step in and disseminate information at refugee hubs, so people know we exist.”
Families are linked up across continents – between Kenya and Stockholm or Uganda and Copenhagen.
Per Heggenes, Cheif Executive Officer, IKEA Foundation, said: “Reunited families torn apart during famine, conflict and crises is a basic and invaluable way to improve the lives of millions of children who are separated from their parents.”