Techfugees World and how it turned mine
It was 7 am on a lazy cold Sunday. I got into my taxi who already knew my name and destination thanks to the new technologies that makes our dialogues shorter with the price of less privacy. I didn’t mind. I never liked to talk anyway. I preferred to write. But it wasn’t enough for the old driver who wanted to engage in more.
” Hi, Where are you from?”
“I am from Syria”
He glanced a look at me from the mirror to make sure he didn’t hear me wrong or maybe to match my looks with the location I just said. It wasn’t the first time I got that reaction but I am still not used to it. He didn’t have a problem expressing his surprise. “ Whoa. Syria! We are afraid of Syrians here!”. Sleepy and confused I replied: “What? Why?”.
“ Don’t you hear the news? Syrians are terrorists. They are bombing everywhere. Didn’t you see what they did in London Bridge?”
For the next 20 minutes, we engaged in a pointless argument where I try to explain how the media doesn’t tell the truth and what is the real narrative around Syrians, while he kept listing all the negative stereotypes about Syrians, refugees, Muslims that I don’t want to repeat here again. I left the car agitated. When did the term terrorism started to be associated with Syrians?! Why does media keep displaying Syrians escaping war as poor, filthy, uneducated, extremist nation?
It has been almost five years for me in Europe. I have avoided many taxis, I don’t stay a lot for networking after events and I think more than I should before answering the simple question “Where are you from?”
Since my superpower, well if I am allowed to call it that, is playing with data, I decided to dig into it. Using GDELT, the open source for daily news articles around the world, I extracted articles tagged by GDELT as related to refugees. Then, I crawled their content and looked for sentences describing them. I wanted to see how are they described. What comes with the word refugee. Refugees are _____ what?
The results were terrible.
- “Refugees are a burden because they exploit the social benefits and work of the native inhabitants” -65% of Italians believe that based on a poll by IPSOS MORI
- “Migrants are a threat to Hungary” -Viktor Orban, Hungary’s President
- “Refugees do not come with firewood from their countries, they have destroyed our environment.”-Rebecca Kadaga, The Speaker of Parliament of Uganda
- “Migrant dogs are stealing the places of native dogs at animal shelters” -MP Gottfried Waldhausl, State Assembly of Lower Austria for the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPO)
And there are more..
Each quote was causing a pinch in my heart.
That explains a lot.
If the public are getting those message daily in their news browsing or by listening to a speech from their favorite politician, how much is that affecting their perception if they have never met a refugee before?
I decided to visualize it all. I used Machine Learning techniques to get an initial classification of the retrieved results as “positive/neutral” and “negative”. I then extracted locations mentioned in the sentences (or articles) and tagged the associated article on a map.
Let the world see it.
I uploaded the map with extra statistics around refugees related articles of one month. June 2018 on a website: refugeesAre.info
Taking the project to the next step, I applied to Techfugees Challenge in the area of social Inclusion. I wanted to spread the word and connect to experts in the domain. Luckily, I was chosen along with 25 finalists to pitch my project in the Techfugees Summit at Station F in Paris.
I have to explain to the reader who is here for the first time that I am not exactly an optimistic person. I have my reasons to believe the world is not a great place, nor it is going to be. And I am angry and frustrated and disappointed most of the time, more now that I live in Europe and see how unfair life can be for people born and stuck in the wrong side of the borders. But I naively keep trying to make a change. Make things right. Bridge the gap and save the world that sometimes looks like it doesn’t want to be saved.
I came to Techfugees Summit trying not to get my hopes high. I have been to places before where refugees challenges were just a reason to pay thousands of euros to fund useless conferences and discussions with no policymakers planning on changing a thing. I was invited to speak once at the European Commission along with two Syrians about challenges we face. We were the voice for all Syrians and refugees but we had few minutes to speak, no discussions, no follow-ups, no changes at all. Nothing we said mattered or was taken into account. It was wrong and a slap in the face from the real world.
Things at Techfugees were not exactly what I expected.
Syrians and Refugees were everywhere. Not only they were given the opportunity to register and join the summit for no charge, but they were also involved in the talks from the beginning. They were the centre of many panelists. They were pitching projects and startups. They were given a voice. And I can’t describe enough how great it felt to hear all the success stories they were behind. And the amazing supporters behind them.
The general tone of the talks was not “We want to do X to help refugees but it is very complicated” but more like “We’ve done X and next we are doing Y to help refugees”
The positive energy of making good out of tech was contagious. Listening to projects pitches, work already going on the ground, success stories one after the other was inspiring. I want to list them all but I could not meet them all due to the fact that some where running on parallel. But I want to mention some in short lines:
- Natakallam (We Talk) where refugees can work online as language teachers and translators. The platform serves as a bridge between two cultures and a window for the refugees to the world.
- EdSeed To support and fund refugees’ education.
- Bureaucrazy to help newcomers understand complicated governmental forms in Germany.
- Mohajer: help refugees in Iran stay safe and get informed.
- Antura Learn Arabic in an easy and fun way playing games.
- Daradam: if you prefer classic games to learn check Arabicubes and more beautifully made games for Arabic kids. (I already bought one!)
- Proud Kitchen: find catering opportunities of yummy authentic food prepared by refugees.
- Tykn: Using Blockchain technology to build safe and private digital identities for refugees.
- Huminium: a startup working on finding alternative, easier, and more safe options to desperate migrants in difficult situations dreaming on reaching Europe, preventing them from falling into the trap of human traffickers. Hearing about their success stories was priceless especially after hearing lots of horror stories from friends and families who suffered from smugglers.
- Crisis Classroom Who train volunteers to work with refugees and help educate them. They held a workshop in the summit about how to make Fattoush. A classic salad dish in the middle east. The idea as simple as it is, managed to bring people from different backgrounds together, break the ice and borders and make everyone have fun learning and eating
All the startups were running/co-running by displaced people or people close to them. This was the main reason behind their success in my opinion.
It was a bittersweet moment to listen to the speech from the former PM of Greece. How governments should let the refugees have their new beginnings. let them vote, let them work, let them live. If only policies were as simple as that. Listening later about the status of #Aquarius from Michael Neuman, Director of studies at Crash / Médecins sans Frontières was the most painful. Statistics of refugees drowned, killed, captured, or lost in the Mediterranean due to what he called Europe’s Failure.
Being in Techfugees Summit was more like a group therapy session. I needed to hear about all the work going on from displaced people like me, and all the efforts being made to support them. I needed to hear someone acknowledging our diaspora, its consequences and complications. I needed to hear the Syrian dialect spoken around me in joy and talk to successful beautiful Syrians and refugees. I needed to get out of my denial bubble that sometimes protects me from the real world and to get angry again, overwhelmed then hopeful again, even for a little bit.
Thanks Techfugees for the healing session. I feel much better.
Looking forward to the next step.
And I forgot to mention .. I won!
Image Credits: https://www.facebook.com/Techfugees/photos/a.769353146747401/769353513414031/?type=3&theater
More about the 25 finalists and winners on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/27/here-are-25-of-the-most-innovative-new-projects-using-tech-to-help-refugees-and-ngos/
RefugeesAre on Unicef: http://unicefstories.org/2018/10/01/are-refugees-a-threat-a-news-analysis-platform-to-map-public-opinion-around-refugees/
