Refugees, Digital Technology, and the Promise of Mutual Aid
Six key insights from our research
I have co-authored a paper with my colleagues at aidx, titled The Promise of Mutual Aid, detailing our findings from research we have conducted over the last year into how refugees support themselves. We used methods from human-centered design to work with Somali, Syrian, and South Sudanese refugees. The full paper is available here.
Key Insights
1. Refugees are ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances.
While their circumstances are extraordinary, many of the concerns of refugees are ones that would be familiar to people everywhere: finding a job, paying the rent, dealing with health bills, and accessing education.
2. The majority of assistance that refugees receive comes from within their social networks and communities.
Networks of self help or, as we refer to them, mutual aid are a fundamental part of how refugees survive day-to-day. They employ sophisticated social systems that range from the formal to the informal, from two-party agreements to large and highly coordinated group action. The sharing, giving, and pooling that these networks facilitate are nearly ubiquitous among the refugees we interviewed.
3. Financial pooling is one of the most powerful examples of mutual aid.
This practice, ranging from the highly structured to the informal, is widespread amongst those we interviewed and served as a source of gifts, loans and savings.
4. Despite its many strengths, mutual aid also presents a number of challenges.
Participating in mutual aid can be very time consuming. Misaligned expectations and breaches in trust are a significant cause of distress, and people with poor social networks struggle to access its benefits. Financial pooling is made more difficult at times by its heavy reliance upon cash.
5. Digital technologies are failing to support systems of mutual aid.
Despite the prevalence of mutual aid among vulnerable populations very little effort has been directed toward building digital technologies that strengthen and support these networks.
6. There is an opportunity to develop new solutions.
There is a unique opportunity to combine the best practices in human-centered design with informed technology choices to build new products that map over the social technologies of mutual aid in ways that empower individuals and strengthen communities.
authors: Tarig Hilal, Gerard Mc Hugh, Dacia Douhaibi, Gordon Mangum
