Smartphones have changed the way people flee.

“Without my smartphone I wouldn’t have made it to Germany,” explains Bassem*, a young man from Syria.

Maps with directions to border crossings, weather reports, language translators to help refugees communicate with volunteers and locals, and social media, which helps refugees share reliable information with one another – many of those who might otherwise have perished managed to reach safety thanks to technology.

The number of mobile phones used in the refugee community is high. In the second largest refugee camp in the world, in Za’atari, Jordan, 86% of young people in the camp owned a mobile phone in 2015, with more than 50% of those using it to access the internet daily.

Technology is also driving the response to the largest humanitarian crisis since the second world war. It is being used to transform conditions and empower more than 22 million refugees worldwide.

Last month, for example, the social enterprise Techfugees hosted a hackathon in Jordan, where more than a third of the population are now refugees. The event brought people together to collaborate and find technology solutions to problems in the camp. It was won by two female Syrian refugees, who used crowdsourcing to identify water leakages in public piping and address the problem of water shortages.

Buoyed by this success, Techfugees is creating an online platform where innovators can pitch their solutions to charities, and charities can request tech help.

This is not just about day-to-day survival. With very limited educational and employment opportunities, there is little future for refugee populations. This is why MIT recently launched the Refugee ACTion Hub (ReACT), to find digital learning opportunities for a lost generation of children who, as a result of forced displacement, are losing their education.

MIT ReACT’s founder, Admir Masic, lost everything during the war in the former Yugoslavia and became a teenage refugee. “I had access to a great deal of humanitarian support, such as food, clothes and shelter, but what changed my life was access to education,” Masic says.

“Unlike many other kids in my refugee camp, I found an opportunity to prove my talent and that ended up changing my life.”

Now an assistant professor, Masic aims to ensure refugees are given access to quality education and an MIT-certified qualification, creating a strong foundation for them to realise their dreams. It is school and university coming to them.

Last year, the MIT Enterprise Forum pioneered a global initiative to encourage the technological potential of sectors including healthcare and energy through the Innovate for Refugees competition.

At the awards ceremony in October, seven winners were chosen from more than 1,600 applications worldwide. In total, 15% of applicants were refugees, two of whom were among the winners.

One of these was the Lebanese-based Recycle Beirut, a social business taking on two problems – the refugee crisis and the country’s waste crisis – at once. The company employs refugees at a living wage to collect, sort and process recyclables in the greater Beirut area.

Another winning idea was Change Water Labs, which uses a revolutionary evaporative toilet to provide refugees with a more dignified and humane experience in unpleasant camp conditions.

A further example of technology supporting refugees is Dan Levin’s Refugee Open Ware and Loay Malhameh’s 3Dmena. Together, Levin and Malhameh partnered with Syria Relief and the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs to use 3D printing for prosthetics that are custom-built and cheaper, as well as a prototype cheap echolocation device that allows visually impaired people to navigate their homes.



Levin and Malhameh are part of a network of not-for-profit technologists, aid workers and entrepreneurs trying to “hack” some of the challenges refugees inside and outside of conflict zones encounter every day, from connecting to the internet to fighting barrel bombs.

“Much of what we’re doing,” says Levin, “is trying to disrupt the whole nature of humanitarian relief, of civil defence, perhaps even of warfare itself”.

*Some names have been changed

Tazeen Dhunna Ahmad is founder of Humanity’s Heart, whose film about the humanitarian response to the refugee crisis, Humanity Rising in the Refugee Crisis, is soon to be released

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