Refugees United App – An App That Help Reconnect Family Members In Refugee Camps

Refugees United App – An App That Help Reconnect Family Members In Refugee Camps

At Innov8tiv Magazine we’ve been featuring mostly the positive side of Africa, where we’ve seen promising and great tech-inventions coming from the continent. However, there is still a side of the story that we are anything but proud to feature: a large percentage of the African nations are still plagued by poverty, unstable politics, war, famine, natural disasters and inequality. A situation leading to mass exodus of people from their home land seeking refuge in neighboring countries as well as overseas.

During this mass exodus of people, seeking reprieve from the torment and anguish they face back in their home country, family member get split up during the commotion. Members of a family may be forced to hurriedly vacate a place in the wee hours of the night, sometimes literally running for their lives: in a life or death situation. You find that spouses get separated, or parents go different directions with their children unintentionally. Naturally once they get to a safe place like a refugee camp, the first instinct would be to look for their loved ones who fled in a different direction.

There are some refugee camps like Dadaab, in Kenya that holds the world’s record for being the largest refugee camp in the world. For separated families within such a huge refugee camp getting hold of each other can be like looking for a needle in the middle of a hay stack. In some cases members of the same family seek refuge in different refugee camps perhaps located in different countries. To help in this daunting task, one organization dubbed Refugees United has set itself out on a mission to reconnect refugees with their families. This organization has also come up with an innovative app called the Refugee United App which gives the refugee family members the option for searching for their family members from the NGO’s database.

Refugees use this app to create a profile and start searching for their lost family and friends within the Refugees United database. This app is easily accessible to all of the refugees and the signing up process is quite easy, with no need paper works or complicated registration process. The app is available for download completely free of charge. Refugees can register for the service either through the web or mobile phones and give the full details of the person they are looking for: their nicknames, scars, markers and locations. Basically things only known or identifiable by closest family members and friends. The app service comes in the following languages: Somali, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili and English.

In the event a refugee is uncomfortable in revealing their full name and location, there is the option for users choosing just how much information they are willing to put out. Refugee United puts a lot of emphasis in securing the security aspects for the Refugees United server and database. All its applications runs on dedicated secured servers placed behind the best firewall protections systems. The Refugees United servers can only be serviced through a secured protocol that has been narrowed down to a specified IP address. These servers are not connected to the internet and only authorized persons can access it to ensure maximum security. The servers and the systems have the SSL encryptions, and the entire traffic logs files are erased for security purposes. This level of security is a must since in some cases the refugee are high profiled politicians or tycoons who have powerful and connected enemies back in their home countries.