This Platform Has Helped Thousands of Migrants Reconnect with Their Families Back Home

Photo of a refugee camp in Rwanda. Photo by©Elisa Finocchiaro Creative Commons – license – BY

There are about 65 million people worldwide right now who have fled their homeland. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says this is the highest such figure since the second world war. As tragic as that is, it's even more heartbreaking to realize that many of those folks have lost contact with their families.

But help may be on the way.

Two Danish brothers and social entrepreneurs David and Christopher Mikkelsen have found a solution to this challenge. Their platform, REFUNITE, for Refugees United, has registered more than half a million migrants around the world to re-establish lost contact with their families. Here is a video that summarizes the principles of the project:

REFUNITE is headquartered in Kenya, but was first created in Denmark in collaboration with Ericsson. It is funded by the IKEA Foundation and other private foundations and it has partnership with a global coalition of mobile operators and with Facebook.

So far close to 11 million messages have passed through the platform and has performed over 9 million searches, with 600,000 total registrations all over the world. By 2017 REFUNITE aims to register 1 million displaced people.

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