AudiencScapes

Refugees United helps people displaced by war, disaster or political repression track down their loved ones. Operating mostly in Africa, the relatively young NGO recently announced a platform using mobile phone technology to connect refugees. Dinfin Mulupi interviewed Refugees United’s co-founder and Managing Director Christopher Mikkelsen.

By Dinfin Mulupi

The concept for Refugees United grew out of an encounter Christopher Mikkelsen and his brother David had five years ago while working on a documentary about integration in Denmark. They met an Afghan refugee named Mansour living in Denmark, who was looking for his brother, from whom he had been separated for 6 years.

To help Mansour track down his brother, the Mikkelsen brothers embarked on a 10-month ordeal. They exhausted all possibilities as they searched through organizations, government agencies and other groups who have contact with displaced persons. The Mikkelsens say that, while they were met with “tremendous amounts of goodwill,” they also met a “near-impossible situation when it came to helping the one refugee in the midst of this gigantic ocean of despair.” Everyone they turned to understood the massive migratory flows, the hundreds of thousands moving across borders, they say, but when “one man raised his hand, few possibilities arose.” In the end, they were successful. They found Mansour’s brother and traveled to Russia to witness the brothers’ reunion in Russia. From then on, the plight of refugees around the world became their cause.

AudienceScapes: What was the idea behind Refugees United? Why and when did you start it?

Mikkelsen: Returning from Russia we began discussing the situation: How two well-educated and, relative to refugees of our world, well-off and well-connected Danes had been able to unearth no information, finding no avenues of possibility and, in general, had to act on our own behalf to experience any kind of progress. Moreover, we discovered that no NGO had set up a global IT infrastructure to share information on families separated, [or was] gathering information in a database to be cross-referenced across conflicts and borders, to streamline, speed up and make more successful the process of tracing missing loved ones.

Most importantly: Where was the system to empower refugees in their search for missing loved ones, allowing them the crucial possibility of registering under selective anonymity, revealing only information known to family, while staying hidden from everyone else? [What was needed was] A user-driven portal basing its mandate on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating family as the group unit of society to be protected by state and society. Being granted access to information on your family's whereabouts and health is a human right, regardless of your status or physical whereabouts.

 Refugees United was born.

AudienceScapes: It is reported that you have carried out some pilot projects in Kenya and Uganda. What exactly have you done in Kenya? Who were you targeting? Considering that there are Somali and Sudanese refugees in Kenya, which refugee group did you work with?

Mikkelsen: Most of our work is indeed carried out in Kenya and Uganda. In Kenya we work with the Refugee Consortium of Kenya, KCS, Kenya Red Cross Society and others, to ensure refugees in both camps, such as Dadaab, and in Nairobi, are made aware of Refugees United’s family tracing services. Currently, more than 2,000 refugees in Kenya alone are signing up to our tracing platform every month. The refugees we work with are mainly Somali, Sudanese, Oromo and some Great Lakes refugees.

In Uganda, in partnership with [Swedish manufacturing company] Ericsson, UNHCR and [mobile operator] MTN, we’re currently piloting our mobile solutions, allowing refugees to sign up, search and reconnect via SMS and WAP [Web browser for mobile phones]. This is predominantly being carried out in the Adjumani district in Northern Uganda, and with quite a lot of success. More than 1,100 refugees signed up looking for missing family in the first weeks.

AudienceScapes: What is the significance of reuniting refugees with their families?

 Mikkelsen: Family is the core unit of society, the emotional connection most of us enjoy in pursuit of a happy and whole existence. The bonds we share, the life we share together as families is, essentially, at least in our view, what makes life worth living. To sever ties between loved ones is an enormous emotional burden and serves untold stress, even if for a week, and leaves deep scars on those suffering this separation. We owe it to them, to ourselves, to work as hard as possible on their behalf to ensure information about missing loved ones reaches people as quickly as possible.

AudienceScapes: How many refugees have been reunited with their families through the project? How successful has the Refugees United project been?

Mikkelsen: We are very much at the beginning of our project, meaning that we’re developing and refining tools used and building the critical mass, so we measure our success in outreach and numbers registering onto the refunite.org platform in search of missing family. Moreover, with the complete anonymity of the platform, we get to hear very little, unfortunately, of the reunited families. However, we have spoken with several families over the last few months who have been reunited through Refugees United, which is surprisingly fast to us.

So far 4,500 refugees have joined Refugees United through the mobile phone application, bringing the total number of refugees the organization is helping in their search for family to more than 7,000. The goal of Refugees United is to help 120,000 refugees sign up to begin searching for their families by the end of 2011.

AudienceScapes: When fully rolled out, what kind of platform will be used? How effective will it be?

Mikkelsen: When the mobile pilot is finished, it is to lay the ground for a scaling of the project in collaboration with Ericsson and UNHCR, as we set sights on entering six African nations (Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo) in need of our service and onwards from there. We will mostly be using Web, SMS, where applicable for security reasons, and WAP functionalities to help people sign up and reconnect. Much of our work is concentrated on how refugees interact with the system, educational material surrounding it, outreach through NGO partners, engaging with mobile operators, establishing more and more on-ground partnerships with local refugee organizations and international agencies, etc., and so on, to form a coalition to combat this problem. Moreover, our techies are actively reaching out to the open source community to find help, knowing that so many glowingly smart people can hopefully help us think through this problem.

AudienceScapes: Why the decision to go mobile? Does the mobile platform automatically offer you a wider coverage /access?

Mikkelsen: The mobile platform instantaneously widens our reach from insignificant to near global. We witness mobile phones amongst the poorest of the poor in various camps and engage with people who have come to understand their basic functionalities, even through illiteracy. Engaging with refugees through the Web is, for the most part, impossible in many of the zones in which we operate. The mobile phone is the leveler of information, the entry point to knowledge about family we can extend an offer to almost anyone anywhere. There are currently around nearly 5 billion mobile phones in the world -- we regard each of those 5 billion devices as connectors, waves of information that are able to push our message and reach those most in need.

AudienceScapes: How does Refugees United support itself? What are the future plans for the organization?

Mikkelsen: Refugees United is entirely funded through private foundations and through partnerships with corporations wishing to support the cause to reunite separated refugee families. From the onset of Refugees United, we wanted to build our organization following an open source concept, though adapted to the physical world, where people and organizations bid in to offer what they excel at, building the foundation from a million snippets of wisdom applied through collaboration. We wanted to build an organization that was low cost and high impact, to involve people, to not ask for 10 dollars, but rather 10 minutes of their time; to ask for their thoughts. Thoughts breed knowledge, knowledge breeds understanding and understanding breeds care.

Ericsson contributes with their combined knowledge and power in building and rolling out the mobile platform with us, FedEx provides us with logistical support to reach refugees with information about Refugees United in even the most disconnected places, Google Grants provides us outreach on the Web, and Delta Partners provides us strategic and analytical process to help us reach our goals. The UNHCR provides us staff on the ground to reach refugees in camps and [mobile operator] MTN Uganda provides us with free SMS for refugees to sign up and search Refugees United. All of these entities we could have asked for funds, but their skills, thoughts and reach are worth more than that.

On an operational side of things, because many things do cost money no matter what, Refugees United is funded by the likes of the IKEA Foundation, Omidyar Network and the Maersk Foundation, and are actively looking for partners to help push us further to help more families.

As for the future, right now the scope of helping to bring hundreds of thousands of refugees onto the platform in search of missing family is daunting enough. Our focus remains tight and locked down on the tasks ahead.

Refugees United: http://www.refunite.org/

Dinfin Mulupi is a business journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is currently the East Africa corresp for an online business paper based in Cape Town in South Africa.
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