A Better Way to Trace Scattered Refugees

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/opinion/a-better-way-to-trace-scattered-refugees.html

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The cellphone in Masomo’s bedroom in Ottawa, Canada, rang at 6:30 a.m. on May 26. Usually he turns his phone off at night, but the night before he had forgotten — fortunately.

He heard a voice in French. “I’m calling from Nairobi,” a man said, then asked Masomo his name, his village and whether he had family members he has not heard from for years. “We think we’ve found your brother,” the man said. “Shall we patch him though?” Masomo, who works at a university, had been searching for Ishara for almost a decade. (He asked that I do not identify him or his brother, so these are childhood names.)

Masomo had moved to Ottawa in 2005 at the invitation of a relative, leaving his natal village in the Kivu region of Democratic Republic of Congo, where civilians have been under siege from armies, militias and warlords for decades.

His family was prominent, and therefore a frequent target. “You are emotionally numb and in survival mode all the time,” said Masomo. “Every time you hear a bullet, you try to figure out which direction it’s coming from and run the opposite way. We spent many nights in the bush under the trees.”

In 2009, one of Masomo’s brothers and a cousin were killed, and the family fled. From Ottawa, Masomo lost contact. There were no phones in the village, so he called people he knew in a nearby city, and contacted the Red Cross. No one knew where his family had gone.

Then an African refugee in Ottawa told him about Refunite. He went on its website and opened an account. He gave his name, phone number and place of origin, and listed family members he was searching for.

Three-quarters of a century ago, while World War II still raged, the Allies created the International Tracing Service to help the millions who had fled their homes. Its central name index grew to 50 million cards, with information on 17.5 million individuals. The index still exists — and still gets queries — today.

Index cards have become digital databases, of course. And some agencies have brought tracing into the digital age in other ways. Unicef, for example, equips staff during humanitarian emergencies with a software called Primero, which helps them get children food, medical care and other help — and register information about unaccompanied children. A parent searching for a child can register as well. An algorithm makes the connection — “like a date-finder or matchmaker,” said Robert MacTavish, who leads the Primero project.

Most United Nations agencies rely for family tracing on the International Committee of the Red Cross, the global network of national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. Florence Anselmo, who directs the I.C.R.C.’s Central Tracing Agency, said that the I.C.R.C. and United Nations agencies can’t look in one another’s databases. That’s necessary for privacy reasons, but it’s an obstacle to family tracing.

Another problem: Online databases allow the displaced to do their own searches. But the I.C.R.C. has these for only a few emergency situations. Anselmo said that most tracing is done by the staff of national Red Cross societies, who respond to requests from other countries. But there is no global database, so people looking for loved ones must guess which countries to search.

The organization is working on developing an algorithm for matching, but for now, the search engines are human. “When we talk about tracing, it’s not only about data matching,” Anselmo said. “There’s a whole part about accompanying families: the human aspect, professionals as well as volunteers who are able to look for people — even go house to house if needed.”

This is the mom-and-pop general store model of tracing: The customer makes a request at the counter, then a shopkeeper with knowledge of her goods and a kind smile goes to the back and brings it out, throwing in a lollipop. But the world has 65 million forcibly displaced people, a record number. Personalized help to choose from limited stock is appropriate in many cases. But it cannot possibly be enough.

Refunite seeks to become the eBay of family tracing. In 2005, Christopher and David Mikkelsen helped a friend, an Afghani refugee in Copenhagen named Mansour, look for his family. The Mikkelsens eventually found one of his brothers in southern Russia, and helped Mansour and the brother to meet. “The agency in Denmark literally did not know what its counterparts in Sweden or Australia had,” said Christopher. “This was absurd.”

Christopher was a musician and writer, and David was a documentary filmmaker. “We didn’t know anything about refugees, or about technology,” he said. “But we thought: People scatter globally. We need a global solution. Just create a simple Excel spreadsheet and share it internationally! How hard can this be?”

Pretty hard, apparently. During 2006 and 2007, the brothers took their idea to international agencies and refugee aid groups all over the world. No one bit.

So they did it themselves, finding an enthusiastic response from corporations and their foundations. “We went from being laughed out of every office in this field to having access at every single C.E.O.’s office in every company we approached,” said Christopher. SAP, a global software company, built Refunite’s first management system, and Ericsson built its first mobile platform. FedEx donates shipping, the H & M foundation is sponsoring a pilot of interactive voice response in Pakistan, and S.A.S., the Scandinavian airline, donates flights.

Now United Nations organizations and refugee groups work with Refunite. The International Rescue Committee was Refunite’s partner for its first work in South Sudan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees facilitates Refunite’s outreach in camps and refers family tracing cases; Refunite, in turn, sends people who need protection to the U.N.H.C.R.

Because so much is done free of cost by partners, Refunite can be the world’s largest missing persons platform and still be tiny; it has a staff of 25 and an annual budget of $2 million.

Searchers can register through the group’s website on computer or smartphone or by free text messaging on basic phones. Refunite had, and is reopening, a call center in Nairobi, staffed by refugees from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s also establishing a call center in Pakistan that operates in the Urdu and Pashto languages.

In addition to the basics, registrants can add personal information they believe will help family members identify them — a childhood nickname, for example. The algorithm identifies potential matches. The searcher can then contact a possible match through the Refunite platform.

Mikkelsen said that so far, 750,000 people have registered. Countries with the most users are Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan and Iraq.

That’s a tiny percentage of the world’s displaced and their families, and Refunite’s numbers reflect this; Mikkelsen said there have been about 6,000 reconnections so far.

What about that ultimate search machine, Facebook? Well, Facebook is only for people who can read, have smartphones and can afford data. In some countries, that’s most people — Syrians, for example, are typically educated and middle class, and indeed, few of them use Refunite.

But 800 million people around the world can’t read, and only half of the world has access to the internet. Facebook is helping with this; its Free Basics program, which works with local mobile network operators to provide no-cost data service for specified sites, includes Refunite in 17 countries.

“I think about a woman, 55 years old, three children, semiliterate, who flees from Somalia to Kenya,” said Mikkelsen. “If I can serve her needs, we’re in position to capture the full arc.”

It’s not easy. People can use Refunite’s web platform in 12 languages and its text service in five. But refugees speak hundreds. It’s relatively simple to create text service in a new language. It’s very difficult to create interactive voice response, because machines need to learn from lots of material.

Then there are challenges with names. There are many, many Abdi Mohameds in Somalia, for example. And cultural practices vary. Mikkelsen talked about one young man who had trouble filling in his mother’s name. A mother, in his parlance, was a woman who helped raise him. “I have five mothers,” he said.

The biggest challenge is getting the word out. Radio stations serving refugee camps or large groups of displaced people are crucial. Mobile operators like Safaricom in Kenya blast out millions of text messages in local languages about Refunite. Then word-of-mouth — the best advertising — kicks in. At the start of one text blast campaign, 80 percent of people calling the text center had heard about Refunite through a text. Three months later, 80 percent had heard about Refunite through word-of-mouth.

Last May, the man in Nairobi who had called Masomo in Ottawa called him back a few minutes later with Ishara on the line. Shock and excitement drove the sleep from Masomo’s brain as Ishara began to speak.

“My brother had grown into an older man after that long,” Masomo said. “But of course I could recognize the voice.”

After effusive greetings, the brothers talked about their parents (who were well) and other family members, who had landed with Ishara in a refugee camp in Uganda. They exchanged mobile numbers. In all, they talked for 15 minutes.

Refunite’s work is done with the first phone call; the organization doesn’t facilitate in-person reunions. Masamo and Ishara have called each other many times since the first call.

Then in August, Masomo flew to Uganda. There was joy in seeing his family. “But we mourned together people we had lost,” he said. And while he lives a stable life in Canada, his family in Uganda left all they had behind, and in the refugee camp there are few ways to make a living. Health care is also hard to get, he said.

It was painful for him to see. “I am trying to find information to help them resettle,” he said. “There are many obstacles. It is more difficult than I had thought.”