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Good afternoon everyone. I'm here to talk about a design solution and a humanitarian solution that I've been working on for the past four years together with our co-founders David and Christopher Mickelson, our tech team in Kenya, and some of our partners. It's a design solution that I'm excited about. I'm personally really curious about humanitarian innovation, mobile technology, and the different ways that design can be used in humanitarian settings and refugee camps specifically. I've traveled to many refugee camps and through this experience have seen both the opportunities and the limitations of design. As most of you probably know, we're faced with a global refugee crisis, which is very present here in Denmark as well. There are currently about 65 million displaced people in the world. In Referee Night, we try to focus on the families who have lost contact with their missing loved ones during war, conflict, and disaster. During the last two years I've been working for Referee Night, I've had the opportunity to sit down with many of these families myself. I've sat down with women who suffer from depression because they don't know where their children are. I've sat down with families who suffer from psychological issues because they don't know the whereabouts of their relatives or loved ones. And I've also sat down with families who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because they don't know where they are born. where their brothers or their sisters or their daughters are. And so this is the group that we try to focus on. It's a problem that doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's a problem and a humanitarian issue that affects people and families deeply. Now, I want to pause for a second and focus on the users that we focus on in Refreinite. I think it's important to mention because we aren't really dealing with the typical Facebook user or people who are easy to reach. So in Refreinite, we try to focus on families who are offline most of the time. We focus on families who live in remote areas and in disconnected areas, oftentimes completely off the grid. We focus on families who are living in refugee camps. I know that there are really good initiatives right now, and slowly some of the big tech companies of the world are starting to wire the world's refugee camps. But what I've seen in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and elsewhere, is that the reality for many refugees and displaced families is that they're completely disconnected. We also deal with families who may be illiterate, and we deal with families who can't afford to pay for data. And why am I saying all of these things at a conference that is supposed to focus on design? I'm saying these things because these challenges also inform our designs internally, and it informs how we think about design and our technical skills. So, what is RefriNight? You actually said it perfectly in your intro pitch, but it's a family reconnection platform, and we currently have about 500,000 users on our platform, which makes it the biggest missing persons network for refugees and displaced families globally. I mean, if you compare it to major platforms like Spotify and Facebook, this is a low number, 500,000 users. But if you think about what the number represents, you can see that behind this number, it's a story of families, of mothers, brothers, fathers who have lost contact with their family members. This is a really high and alarming number. So, this is a group that we focus on. We currently have partnerships in about 19 countries, and we have access to many mobile subscribers, which I'll talk about a bit, because this also shapes how we design mobile solutions. Now, let me just talk a little bit about the team. So, in RefriNight, we have recruited people from many different backgrounds. So, we employ people with humanitarian backgrounds, refugees, designers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. And the overall goal is, of course, to reconnect families, but we also believe that if we are to achieve this goal, we need to have a... How do you say that? An approach that brings together many different people, and different disciplines. Good. So, we are based out of Nairobi in Kenya, working from Nairobi Garage, which is Africa's biggest co-working space for entrepreneurs. But we actually started in Denmark. This is also where I'm from and where I grew up, but quickly realized that if we need to design really good solutions for families living in camps, we need to get out of the conference room and out of our comfort zone and into the world's refugee camps and start the design process there. So, today, this is where we develop many of our prototypes and our sketches and our first drafts together with families from different countries. It's not to say that you can't do it here, just to say that we personally spend a lot of money trying to build the first version of our platform here, only to go to camps and figure out this is not what people want, and this is not how they use mobile technology in different camps. So, how does it work? So, it's a family reconnection platform, and it can be accessed through different touchpads, depending on the country you're in. So, as an example, let's say you're based in a refugee camp in Kenya, and you only have a low-end feature phone, no smartphone. Then you can search through our platform through SMS. You can also search through USSD, which is a technology that's super popular in many African countries. It's a technology that's known for two-way communication. You can also search through one of our global hotlines, or you can search through Referee and I. And soon, you'll be able to search also through interactive voice response, which I'll be talking about a little bit, and also through Android. So, how does it work? Let's say I am based in a big refugee camp in Kenya, just using Dadaab refugee camp as an example, said to be one of the world's biggest refugee camps. I'm searching for my brother, Apti, using that as an example. So, I take out my phone, and I type in the name of the person that I'm looking for. And the platform then searches for potential matches. And if there is a match, I receive a text message on my phone saying, Hi, we know that you're searching for Apti. There is a new person with that name who just registered in a certain area. So, we have spent a lot of time figuring out how to create the perfect search algorithm. And I wouldn't say that we have solved this problem. It's like ongoing work. It's really challenging because we do it in many different languages. And people have many different ways of entering their names. But we're trying, and we're testing different things, trying to make it work. So, I think that in many parts of the world, we tend to take it for granted that most people have access to the internet, or most people have a phone, even if they're based in a refugee camp. I know that in Denmark, there was a lot of discussion around Syrian refugees. I remember there was a couple of newspapers that picked it up, these stories of Syrian refugees, how many families are bringing smartphones. And I think the headlines were something like, you know, if they have access to smartphones and they can pay for smartphones, I mean, how poor can they really be? I think that was the question. But what I've seen in some of the camps that I visited is that oftentimes, refugee families, they will have their SIM cards disconnected, simply because of their refugee status. That's something that happens to many refugees because the government wants to figure out where they are, I've also seen families swapping their SIM cards for food coupons, which means that a lot of times, they actually don't have a SIM card. And you also find families who, or households who have to share one SIM card, even if it's a really, really big family. That's something I've seen in Congo, as an example, and in Somalia as well. And we've also seen examples of families that actually have a smartphone, but even if they have a smartphone, they turn it off 99% of the time, because they can't afford the data cost. So this is just to say, these are some of the challenges that we're up against, and that we're thinking about as we create these design solutions for refugees and displaced families. So this is obviously not something we can do alone. We are a small team, and we are constantly stretched thin. So to achieve this goal, we've partnered with private sector companies. And I think that that has also been one of our biggest lessons learned as a small Danish startup, is that in order to achieve these goals, and in order to work internationally, we have to partner with people who are better at doing things than us, and who already have the infrastructure in place. So this is a list of some of the partners that we work with. Our biggest technology partner right now is Ericsson, and Facebook as well. Facebook has created this initiative that's called Free Basics by Facebook, which basically allows refugees and displaced families to access life-saving services, and they've included our service as well. Now, I'm also mentioning these partnerships because these partnerships have really helped us think about design in a different way. So as an example, I think back in the days, we would sit in Copenhagen, and we would launch a campaign in Somalia as an example, and we would get a translator in Denmark to translate all our content, thinking, this is going to be great, because this person has a Somali background, you know, problem solved. And I think that today, not to say that this is the perfect solution, but we're more thinking along the lines of, you know, let's get the local mobile operator that we work with in Somalia to help us test our mobile designs, our different screens, and the content that we put out, and the translations to make sure that we use language that's appropriate and designs that are appropriate. I mean, small things like certain cultures in Somalia, it's not appropriate to feature images of people. If you look back at some of our first campaigns, we had, like, people all over the place. So just to say that we are getting smarter, and we're slowly starting to understand the cultures that we are, that we're here to serve. So what does an SMS campaign look like in Referee Night, and how do we design these SMS campaigns? So just to give you one example, this is a campaign that I was in, I've been involved in for a couple of years. Iraq is home to many displaced families, and Iraq is also home to many families that have lost contact with each other. This is something we know from the research that we've been doing on the ground. So in order to generate awareness around our family reconnection platform, we designed a large-scale and nationwide SMS campaign to try to inform families of the reconnection service. In order to do so, we spent a lot of time split-testing the different mobile screens to see which one would people, which mobile screens people would be more likely to click on. We also tested languages that we used in the text messages before we send it out, and we've also launched several polls to figure out which campaigns people tend to respond to. So since we launched our campaign in Iraq, we send out thousands of text messages to camps for displaced families. So one of our keywords internally is localization. So localization is something that drives all our work, and that encompasses both translations, also figuring out and doing research about the norms and cultures and the different ways people engage with mobile technology before we do anything or we launch anything. So as an example, we've seen from some of our campaigns that Syrian families, they're highly connected. So their issue is not that they don't have access to smartphones. Their issue is that they can't afford to pay for data. We've also seen as an example in some of the camps that we're working with in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that families still use lower end feature phones. And this is something I remember from my own trip there that we had launched what we thought was such a perfect product. It worked so well in the office, and we tested it with Congolese refugees in our office in Kenya. But then when I came to the DRC, it was really like a big revelation for me. It was like a big revelation because no one understood anything. It was just way too complicated. And I think that that's one of our biggest, that's perhaps one of our biggest challenges as an organization. How do you create a technology solution that's highly advanced and complex with a really, really complex search algorithm and matching algorithm, but at the same time designing it in a way that is so simple that even families who may be illiterate or not so tech savvy can figure out how to use the technology. So that's our big challenge. And in order to solve this issue, we also engaged different refugee groups to try to help us solve the issue. So as an example, in Kakuma refugee camp, which is a camp in Kenya, we deploy a team of mobile outreach volunteers, which is basically refugees from different groups, from Congo, from South Sudan, from Somalia, now also from Burma, from Burundi, just using them as an example, who are helping us reach out to the refugee communities there to figure out how we develop good solutions. So I would never, I travel to these camps and I work with them, but I would never, as an example, be able to go up to a Somali man in Kakuma refugee camp and ask him how he prefers to, prefers us to design the mobile solution. I think that is a way more effective strategy to work with mobile outreach volunteers who have the refugee experience themselves and a cultural background, and then they talk to the communities there and develop the solutions. Now, we've also realized that in order to solve these issues, we need to think collectively, together with other people, technologists, people with an innovative background, people from the mobile industry who can help us solve the issue. So as an example, we launched a global hack for good, which spanned seven years. which spanned San Francisco, Cairo, Nairobi, I believe there were two other cities as well. And basically figuring out how do we solve this challenge collectively and how do we come up with good designs. So as an example, the winner of our global hack for good, Zach Halbert, he created an offline solution, the prototype and the designs for an offline solution, which allows families to register even if they're offline. And I then took him to the world, to Kakuma refugee camp, where he further developed his prototype. And that was really interesting because it's a good example of the aha moments you have when you actually visit a camp, especially if you're from San Francisco and used to develop high-tech solutions. So what's next? The next step for us is to dive into interactive voice response. It's a technical solution I'm really excited about, but it's also an area where we can learn a lot. So it basically means that if you're illiterate and if you don't have, let's say you're unable to read or write, then potentially, and with this solution, you'll be able to register using voice. And we'll be deploying this project in Pakistan in the coming months. And I'm super excited about this project because this is also a good example of a project where before we even start thinking about how families engage with interactive voice response, we need to spend a lot of time in Pakistan, which is something I'll be doing in the coming months, interviewing families about how they see the prototype, how they respond to the prototype, which is currently being built by Ericsson. Yep, I think just leaving everyone on a happy note, this is two sisters that I met in Kakuma refugee camps who had been reconnected by Referee Night. Also want to use this opportunity to say that we're hiring. If anybody wants to quit their well-paid tech jobs and join a small nonprofit. Okay, thank you.
