TECH WORLD HITS WALL OVER REFUGEE CRISIS
Industry wants to help, but finding strategies, solutions proves difficult
DUBLIN The technology world prides itself on its capacity to solve problems, and it has taken an active interest in a big one recently: Europe’s migrant crisis.
But the entrepreneurial community has struggled to connect the dots with others working to ease the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflict and persecution in the Middle East and Africa this year, Mike Butcher, TechCrunch’s London-based editor at large, said at the Dublin Web Summit.
“There just didn’t appear to be any coherent response from the technology world,” said Butcher, who urged attendees at Europe’s largest technology conference to get involved by donating computers to refugees, hiring them as freelancers and putting them in touch with fundraisers.
In September, Butcher started the “Techfugees” group, designed to get the industry engaged with problems faced by refugees — like money, sustenance, shelter, health, immigration bureaucracy — and to build links between refugees, Silicon Valley and charities, NGOs and volunteers. The group has a Facebook page and nearly 1,200 followers on Twitter.
As migrants and refugees have poured into Europe this year, major technology players such as Google have raised millions in donations. Crowdfunding initiatives and smartphone apps have sprung up to ease the burden of navigation and communication with relatives and fellow travelers. Online petitions and activism have flourished.
But finding solutions, let alone a cohesive strategy for a problem that has consistently eluded policymakers, has proved difficult for technology’s dynamos.
“It’s super easy to build a small thing for a few people, anybody can do that, for 10,000 people say; it’s much harder to build networks and platforms and systems that work for 10 million people,” said Chris Fabian, who co-leads the innovation unit at the United Nations Children’s Fund and spoke to USA TODAY on the sidelines of the summit.
Fabian said the most creative solutions he has seen are not coming from the U.N. or from technology companies but from the refugees themselves.
He noted that in a refugee camp in Lebanon he saw kids who had hacked into the camp’s solar lights to power their video game consoles. “That’s incredible. I want those kids on my team,” he said. “When they saw me coming, they hid the wires.”