Massive Displacement Meets Cyberspace: How Information and Communication Technologies are helping Refugees and Migrants and How We Can Do Better
Massive Displacement Meets Cyberspace: How Information and Communication Technologies are helping Refugees and Migrants and How We Can Do Better

Author(s): Joseph G. Bock, Kevin McMahon, Ziaul Haque
Subject(s): Media studies, Communication studies, Evaluation research, Migration Studies, ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; digital apps; machine learning; ICT4D; Information and Communication Technologies; social media;
Summary/Abstract: Since the global response to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for humanitarian assistance has grown dramatically. These technologies include mobile phones, applications (“apps”) installed on phones, and computer connectivity or internet-based sites which receive data from or send it to phones. We call these collectively “platforms”. Employing them has the potential to improve efforts to assist displaced people, or to liberate them in being more able to help each other, or both. The magnitude and visibility of the current refugee and migrant crisis has yielded a rich harvest of new platforms, a survey of which we cover in this paper. Similar to the acronym ICT4D, commonly used to denote the use of ICTs for development, we refer to the technologies in this paper collectively as ICTs for refugees and migrants, or simply ICT4RM. And while platform development has resulted in a patchwork of initiatives-an electronic version of “letting a thousand flowers bloom”-there are patterns emerging as to which flowers grow and have “staying power” as compared to ones that wilt and die. In hopes of providing guidance to wouldbe developers, we offer explanations for what leads to a successful ICT4RM initiative.

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