Technology to aid millions of female refugees

Refugee crisis is a not a particular state’s problem. Mass exodus from devastated countries like Syria, Iraq or people fleeing violence, poverty and instability of their homelands is more than just a Middle East’s or African problem. It’s a global issue. It is affecting all but most importantly the refugees themselves.

The most vulnerable among them are of course children and women who collectively make up to 80 percent of world refugees.Female refugees are among the most vulnerable, facing sexual violence, coercion, forced and early marriage, social isolation, and a lack of access to gender-specific health care and education.Bereft of any advice and information, they are often unable to get the help they need. But technology could provide aid. EmpowerHack, a coding and design hackathon aims to address this neglect.

“EmpowerHack is a collective that creates sustainable design for women and girls in humanitarian contexts. Bridging the gap between technology, design, and NGOs to address key challenges, EmpowerHack galvanizes volunteers to create code that crosses borders.”

"There was a real need that was being neglected," says Hera Hussain, founder of domestic violence charity Chayn, which is one of many organisations involved in EmpowerHack.

Participants in the latest London event, between April 8 and 10, included voluntary technology community Techfugees; Women Hack for Non-Profit, an organisation that matches skilled women with open source, non-profit projects; the Muslim Doctors Association; and Terre des hommes, an organisation that helps disadvantaged children. The event earlier this month was the third EmpowerHack, with previous meet-ups in Ghana and London. The next event will take place in Amsterdam between April 22 and 24.

While governments are squabbling over numbers, there's an ever-growing community of tech enthusiasts who have taken things into their own hands.Founded in September 2015, Mike Butcher’s Techfugees already has more than 2,000 members in 12 countries.In one of his interviews, Butcher told Forbes "We want to promote refugees as an asset to the tech industry, not a burden on society."

Before the latest EmpowerHack, Women Hack for Non-Profit organised a beginner coding workshop in Ruby and HTML for those attending the event from a non-tech background. This skill-sharing and commitment to open-source development is key to how this hackathon works, its founder argues.

"We're not looking for a hot topic, we're looking for the next topic," says Han Pham, co-founder of EmpowerHack. The projects they work on, she explains, focus on issues that are too complicated to respond to when millions of people are at risk. At the latest event, one team is challenged with designing a service to provide mental health support for volunteers in the field. Another asks how NGOs can process tens of thousands of missing and undocumented children. A third project looks at how to help refugees with chronic diseases that require repeat prescriptions.

EmpowerHack owes much of its success to collaboration; they have small and dedicated teams to address several vital issues. Each project is also linked to an NGO that is willing to back and use the technology that's created. Most of the projects take existing ideas and designs and rework them for a different audience.

One app presently being developed is Soul Medicine, a smartphone app that sends an inspirational quote to refugees via SMS or WhatsApp. The designing of app comes with its unique problems; while 70 per cent of Syrian refugees have a smartphone, many are shared between one or two families. How do you design for multiple users? And might Soul Medicine's chosen quotes be too happy or too sad?

Hababy, a web app that provides prenatal and postnatal information for refugee women, came out of a previous EmpowerHack. One of its creators, Dr Hina Shahid, is now the clinical lead. "The concept came from the first hackathon in November," she says."The design challenge was inspired by my experiences in Lesvos – what I saw, and where the leads were. It's about taking pregnancy care forward."

"The web app has changed a lot – we're now targeting where we think we'll make the most difference, looking specifically at five red flags that pregnant women can face". Hababy is now hoping to integrate with Doctors of the World's Clinic Finder, which uses geo-location to find medical services for refugees.

No one can deny that Refugee crisis is too complex an issue to be solved with the click of a mouse, or by downloading an app; there might be way bigger ethical challenges that need to be addressed before. But at-least there is a glimmer of hope in what technology is doing. While governments are struggling to cope, the tech community is at least making an effort to ease the refugee's inevitable journey.