2021 Non-Profit Organisation Awards

Acquisition International - 2021 Non-Profit Organisations Awards Company: Refugees United Contact: David Mikkelsen Website: refunite.org Best Global Refugee Family Reconnecting Organization 2021 ounded in 2008, REFUNITE – Refugees Unite – was developed to provide a new, innovative, and technologically adept solution for family tracing. Fundamentally, it believes that everyone deserves to know where their family is, with access to the necessary tools that will allow them to be found; whilst existing family tracing tools did exist, they were notoriously flawed and ineffective. The prior solutions were analogue and dependant on aid workers being able to trace a singular case through a myriad of files, from missing person reports to complete searches and results sharing, giving the person searching for their family no agency in the process, and making for a painful and frustrating process. REFUNITE seeks to change all that by being the solution that allows searchers to take charge of their own search. Refugees and internally displaced people alike can use its service to access SMS, USSD, and call centres in order to register profiles, file missing persons reports, conduct searches, and reconnect with lost loved one – something that is still invaluable, and during 2008 in the Sahara Desert, was especially so. Since REFUNITE’s founding, more than 1.2 million people have been registered in its database, and over 65,000 people reunited with their families through its work. The past 3 years have also been landmark for REFUNITE and its service users, as it has expanded its product offering to tackle issues even beyond the family tracing it is so passionate about. REFUNITE, noting the expansion of smartphone technology into the Sub Saharan Africa region, and the subsequent technological exponential curve, has observed that illiteracy, limited technological prior knowledge, and poverty are major hurdles to progress. The internet accessibility for new smartphone users is also limited to the preinstalled apps on given pieces of hardware, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Xender. Web browsers are largely unfamiliar, making social media the core source of news for many, and without the benefit of being informed how such things can be used for fake news and misinformation, it can actually hinder more than it helps. REFUNITE responded with the release of RELAY. Since then, it has become the largest civil society network in Africa, and is an invitation only network where civil society leaders can recommend their peers to join, encompassing 35 countries, 26,000 leaders, and representing 24 million constituents, all numbers that are growing at a rate of 15% per month. It has been designed to amplify and support civil society leaders in Africa, giving them the network and the connectivity needed to keep themselves and their constituents well informed. Recently, F REFUNITE has been expanding RELAY and educating the community leaders it serves about the benefits of vaccination against Covid-19. This has been immensely successful, turning 9 out of 10 followers from sceptics into avid defenders of the vaccine. With an incredible team that is confident enough to take a 10% chance of making a 100x return on investments, it has built a staff that are agile, adaptable, and ready to learn, undaunted by lack of support by government agencies. Furthermore, each of them have been even more dedicated to their work than ever during the Covid-19 outbreak, with many front line staff being recalled and leaving communities without support – in such cases, leaders have been able to use RELAY to remain in touch with this support system, and the platform’s reach is set to surpass more than 50 million people by the end of 2021. Partnered with more than 50 NPOs, pushing the need for vaccination, and allowing better connectivity across the board, RELAY has become the go-to-market partner in project implementation, alongside REFUNITE’s constant good work in reuniting loved ones across the region. In a world where connectivity seems more accessible than ever, it’s important to remember that ease of access is not universal. In Sub Saharan Africa, it certainly is not, but REFUNITE is the non-profit seeking to change that, reuniting families with its new methods of family tracing and it RELAY platform, connecting community leaders to each other, support systems, educational resources, and accurate news. May21604