Find Missing Family
100 thousand. One hundred thousand lives touched. One
hundred thousand refugees separated from family members during their escape
from conflict.
On April 23rd, Refugees United passed a significant
milestone in its short history: The one hundredth thousand refugee in search of
missing family registered onto our family tracing platform. Growing from a
point of life where, just a few years ago, the size of the problem of refugees
being separated from family was almost unknown to other refugee agencies,
Refugees United and partners have shone not only an enlightening light, but
brought forth a sweeping beam of technology to help solve this problem of
family separation.
Where family tracing for refugees was carried out before via
pen and paper, and through individual efforts, now, through the Refugees United
platform and mobile technologies, built with Ericsson, we’re seeing an
unprecedented level of collaboration between not only refugee agencies, but
with refugees themselves.
Deployed across refugee camps and urban areas in Kenya,
Uganda, Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa, the Refugees United mobile
tracing system is now, in the hands of the Red Cross, the United Nations
Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Refugee Consortium of Kenya and others, helping more
than 500 refugees sign up to try to reconnect with missing family every day.
Before the birth of this system, an individual refugee agency had the capacity
to help approximately 700 to 800 refugees sign up to search for missing loved
ones a year.
Utilizing simple mobile technologies, accessible to aid
workers as well as refugees in the camps, the platform has seen tremendous
growth, especially over the past 3 months. As we have refined and reshaped our
technology and outreach, our partners have soared to new heights in their
approach, helping more than 25,000 refugees in the past 2 months alone! The
Refugees United system was built on the concept that only through collaboration
can anything be achieved; this 100th thousand milestone and the current rise of
efficiency bears testament to this ideology.
We have had, and continue to have, our fair share of
failures and mistaken ventures. When you push technology and digital platforms
to a refugee population of some 43 million, many of whom have never engaged
with such technology before, you’re bound to chase down dead end streets. That
being said, only in these forays off the charted map will you understand what
not to do - a wildly underestimated exercise in the world of aid.
At the end of the day, the reason for our work is to help
families find each other again through the chaos of being a refugee. When we
succeed, as we do more and more often, every reconnection between two family
members, often reconnecting 6, 7 or 8 people, pumps through the arteries of
Refugees United and our partners the very life blood of why we do what we do.
Every story is heartbreaking, every story a journey unto itself. Please, take a
moment and read about this recent reconnection between to Congolese brothers,
separated after more than 10 years of separation (read the story here) to truly
understand the need for what we do.
We’d like to end this blog post by thanking our many
partners, to whom much of this success can be attributed: Omidyar Network, IKEA
Foundation, Ericsson, Kenya Red Cross, UNHCR, RCK, Intersos, SAP, Delta
Partners, MTN, Maersk Foundation, Danfoss Foundation and many, many others.
Here’s to you!
