Solve one of these nine challenges and help reunite separated refugee families. Put your skills to the test and compete to win a trip to Kenya and test your prototype in a refugee camp. Join the Global Hack for Good powered by Ericsson and Refugees United. This Global Hack for Good will take place in Cairo, Silicon Valley, and Nairobi. Register on Meetup.com today and participate in the event in your city. At each event, dedicated developers will have a weekend to solve a technical challenge that will be judged by an expert jury including Ericsson and Refugees United representatives.…

Copenhagen, Denmark – Prix Ars Electronica honors individuals, institutions and organizations that have made an outstanding achievement in the field of art and technology.   Refugees United has received an Award of Distinction from Prix Ars Electronica 2013 in the category Digital Communities, which honors innovative work that bridges geographical, cultural and gender divides. Established in 1987, Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important awards honoring what is new, radically different and making an impact right now. Headquartered in Linz in Austria, Prix Ars Electronica has previously honored sites, such as Wikipedia, Pixar and Wikileaks. The Award of Distinction…

The students at NYU Stern School of Business were up for a treat last week as co-founder of Refugees United, Christopher Mikkelsen, guest lectured at their University. “The lecture at NYU was interesting as it bridged the knowledge of technology students in New York with the realities of the millions of people we help in some of the poorest places on earth.” Says Christopher Mikkelsen “Hopefully the students took away not only a sense of our work to reconnect families, but a deeper understanding of people so different from them” The lecture revolved around the prospects that the ever-increasing social…

Maja Okholm, Refuges United’s Communication Assistant, reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Recently, I had the pleasure of spending an entire day with with Refugees United‘s outreach volunteer, Farhiya. Together we went on a work assignment to Eastleigh, an area in Nairobi with a large Somali population, sometimes referred to as ‘Little Mogadishu.’ Here, you really experience Somali hospitality first hand. Through this experience I also learned more about Refugees United‘s outreach programmes aimed at reconnecting families separated by conflict, war and disaster.  The recipe is actually surprisingly simple, with only three ingredients, namely: one outreach volunteer (Farhiya), one community with a large refugee population…

A new partnership with the non-profit organization DataKind sets out to help us understand our data better. This in turn, will enable us to make more informed strategic decision, allowing us to help even more families reconnect. Watch the video to see how Mark Sharon from DataKind presented our new partnership at the joint United Nations – Datakind meetup event in NYC last month.  DataKind is a community of data scientists who works with humanitarian causes by helping them to understand their data better and by optimizing systems and operational performance. DataKind will work with Refugees United to explore what our data can tell…