Support the Urban Refuge App - an Aid Locator for Refugees

Urban Refuge is a mobile app for refugees living in Jordan to help them locate aid and other resources. It was created by a group of Boston University students as part of a class in Spring 2016 on forced migration. We want to take the idea from the classroom to the real world - and we need your help!

What is Urban Refuge?

At the beginning of 2016, a class of female undergraduate and graduate students from Boston University embarked on a unique course focused on forced migration and the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Our class quickly turned into more than just a standard college course. After studying the complex situation of the Syrian Refugee Crisis and its effect on the greater Middle East, we saw how difficult it is for refugees outside of camps to access aid and other resources — especially in Jordan. Two-thirds of refugees worldwide live outside of camps, and 80 percent of the 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan fall under this category of "urban refugees." Living outside of refugee camps makes it much more difficult for urban refugees to access services and information. In the absence of an easy-to-use, comprehensive database of service providers in Jordan like schools, clinics, charities, and organizations, urban refugees access aid largely via word-of-mouth. This creates information asymmetries, a lack of choice for refugees, and administrative inefficiencies for organizations. Urban refugees - particularly in the Syrian crisis - also have widespread access to smartphones and cheap data plans, making digital solutions particularly appropriate for this crisis.

Urban Refuge seeks to address the challenge of refugee access to aid outside of camps with a mobile phone app to literally “put aid on the map.” Our app will geocode the hundreds of international and domestic organizations serving refugees in Jordan - from clinics to schools to aid distribution points - and connect refugees with aid and other resources. The Urban Refuge project will pilot in Amman, but we plan to launch versions worldwide, including in Boston.

Who are we?

We are a group of Boston University students, both undergraduate and graduate, who took the course IR 500 Forced Migration and Human Trafficking with Prof. Noora Lori in Spring 2016. We have a variety of backgrounds, but we are all passionate about innovating solutions to the current refugee crisis as well as future crises. Although none of us had experience in tech or business before we started Urban Refuge, we took on this project because we believe this is one of the most direct ways for us, as students in Boston, to help refugees across the world.

Why should you donate?

The global migration crisis has reached new heights, with over 65 million people displaced, over 20 million of them refugees exiled from their home countries. Digital interventions like Urban Refuge are one part of the solution to ensuring everyone has the ability to live in dignity, and have agency in their choices, including about how and where they access aid. You can be a part of our team as we try to alleviate one of the major problems faced by non-camp refugees today.

We are seeking to raise $15,000 to pay to geocode the rest of our aid locations in Amman, finish the technology for the app, and conduct outreach to refugees in our test market to get them on the app. Your support is crucial to bringing this project to the people who need it most.

What will you support:

• Technology: You will help us to actually build the app!

• Geocoding: You will help us to add more locations to our database to make sure it is as comprehensive as possible.

• Translation: Your donation supports our ability to translate the entire app into Arabic, and offer audio features to enable all refugees to access the app regardless of literacy.

• Outreach: Your donation will support our outreach efforts to refugee users and organizations, to make sure we get as many people on the app as possible.

• Research: We will also use these funds to support research into technology’s place in migration through the app survey feature.

Prof. Lori and CEO Vicky Kelberer meet with Jordanian Ministry of Education officials (the man on the left is even a BU Alum!), photo taken on an Urban Refuge fact-finding mission in March 2016 supported by the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies.