It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria, where 4.9 million people have been forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nations. How, asked Noora Lori, a Pardee School of Global Studies assistant professor of international relations, could the students in her Forced Migration & Human Trafficking class respond to a crisis so urgent, yet so far away?
Lori challenged her students to come up with an innovative solution that could have a direct impact on the lives of Syrian refugees living in Jordan. After a semester of research, the students delivered the blueprint for Urban Refuge, a smartphone app that would make it easier for refugees in Jordan to find services and for NGOs and community organizations on the ground to better connect with those in need of help.
When the course ended, Lori’s students volunteered to continue with the project and make the app a reality. They launched a fundraising campaign on the BU Crowdfunding platform with the goal of raising $15,000—which they quickly surpassed. The class enlisted help from experts across BU, Syrian and Jordanian organizations, and others, including Microsoft New England, which helped develop the app. The Urban Refuge app—which will be free to use and was piloted in Amman, Jordan, in 2016—is scheduled to launch in May 2017.
Despite the common perception that refugees live mainly in camps, two-thirds of the world’s refugees live outside of such sites, with increasing access to smartphones and mobile technologies. Since there is no existing comprehensive and accessible database of organizations, clinics, or schools that serve the 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, it can be tough to obtain aid. According to some figures, just 20 percent of Syrian refugees in Jordan live in camps.
Urban Refuge pinpoints nearly 200 different services in an easy-to-use, comprehensive map; the user can filter options by type of aid or by beneficiary. The goal is to empower refugees, giving them the information they require to address everyday needs, such as locating health care providers and enrolling their children in school.
This is the kind of far-reaching impact that had seemed implausible to Lori’s students at the outset of the project. “The story of the semester was making the impossible possible in the students’ eyes,” says Vicky Kelberer (CAS’12, GRS’17), an undergraduate academic advisor and graduate cochair of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration & Human Trafficking. As they developed and launched Urban Refuge, they realized “not only can we do this, but we need to do this.”
“It has been the highlight of my college experience to work on Urban Refuge with a team whose members are all equally passionate,” says Meaghan Delaney (CAS’18). Lisa Kadel, who joined the class as an exchange student and continued with the project from her home in Germany, says that “apart from being a wonderful opportunity to develop professional skills, such as teamwork and networking, the class was eye-opening in terms of understanding what connections between academic work and activism can look like.”
To support the Urban Refuge app, visit urbanrefuge.org or email ceo@urbanrefuge.org