Digital Humanitarianism: How Tech Entrepreneurs Are Supporting Refugee Integration
One of the lesser examined responses to the massive refugee flows that surged towards Europe beginning in 2015 has been the burst of social and technological innovation that has emerged.
Technology is transforming every stage of the refugee’s journey, from route planning and sharing information along the often arduous trip, to sending distress signals or reuniting with relatives. It also is being harnessed as a tool to identify and register asylum seekers as well as for refugee integration at destination, both for immediate services such as identifying lodging or providing translation and longer-term services such as work opportunities, peer-to-peer lending, or online job-training programs.
A new report from the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration, Digital Humanitarianism: How Tech Entrepreneurs Are Supporting Refugee Integration, maps the explosion of new tools and initiatives that are being used and how policymakers can better support their development and adoption.
The best established of these innovations, write authors Meghan Benton of MPI and Alex Glennie of Nesta, can be grouped under three general aims: 1) helping newcomers navigate local services; 2) getting them into work or training; and 3) providing access to community-based housing and services. The report finds that many new tools have failed to live up to their promise, however, in part because of extensive duplication in the sector and limited understanding of refugees’ needs.
The authors find that three areas of possible significant impact for technology have received surprisingly little focus: allowing new arrivals to learn in regular classrooms rather than being channeled into remedial classes; providing alternate means of assessing professional expertise and competence; and providing access to credit via alternative finance mechanisms such as crowdfunding.
The report encourages policymakers to channel the streams of innovation by identifying particular problems that could benefit from a tech solution, foster support for the most promising innovations with follow-up funding or incubation support, and invite tech entrepreneurs into integration policy discussions, among other recommendations.
The report is the eighth in a Transatlantic Council series focused on promising practices to promote the longer-term social and economic inclusion of refugees. To read earlier reports in the series, visit here.
KJ