David and I were recently invited to write a blog post for “Conversations for a Better World.” This is what it said:
Refugees United
Throughout our shared planet, more than 43 million people are currently living as refugees and internally displaced persons. Sent from a past demolished towards a future unknown, fear is the only guaranteed companion for millions of people.
Every year, thousands of families are separated in the wake of conflict: mothers from children, siblings from each other, many never to meet again.
Refugees United was formed to streamline the global refugee family tracing process by harnessing the powers of mobile and internet technologies, to provide a cross-conflict and cross-border tracing platform for families to reunite.
Serving not only the refugee NGO communities with a collaborative reconnection tool, we empower the individual refugee through the availability of our tracing services via SMS and WAP in remote areas of Africa on ten-dollar handsets.
For the first time the refugee is the custodian of his or her own fate, deciding to stay, through description, anonymous to all but family, or how much information to share with the world in their quest to reconnect with lost loved ones via, e.g., names, old phone numbers and places family was last seen.
The platforms used are what many of us are fortunate enough to take for granted, but leveraged through the combined efforts of dedicated NGOs we’re reaching the bottom of the pyramid via mobile and radio outreach programs, reconnecting families through dedicated global partnerships.
We believe global problems must be met with global solutions, and that no one such solution is tech-driven, but rather tech-enabled and people driven.
Working with Ericsson, UNHCR and MTN in Uganda and onwards through Africa, we’re piloting the mobile reconnection platform to unite families. While the core mission remains family tracing, it is our hope that we in the process can foster great democracy, efficiency and teamwork, by decentralizing the tracing structure and invite all relevant stakeholders to share information across minds and missions.
None of this can be achieved without technology. None of this can be achieved without partnerships.
Sincerely,
David and Christopher Troensegaard Mikkelsen
