Opening a Window on the World
Refugees need food and medicine, but they also long for access to better education and technology. Microsoft, as a founding member of the UN refugee agency’s Council of Business Leaders, is working with its partners to help meet this demand.
NAIROBI, Kenya — 24 March 2006 — “I would like to know more about the world,” says 21-year-old Paul Parach Majak. A student at Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, he professes a keen interest in geography but is frustrated by his limited access to information. Listening to his words are Wendy Chamberlin, deputy commissioner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), together with Patrick De Smedt, Microsoft EMEA chairman, and top executives from three other global companies.
“Education is one of the top priorities for developing the potential of people. We have to help you get access to technology so that you can discover what is beyond the borders that you see right now,” replies De Smedt, rising to his feet in the hot, poorly equipped classroom to address Majak and his fellow students.
De Smedt visited the camp last week as a member of the UNHCR’s Council of Business Leaders (CBL), an innovative public-private partnership designed to enable refugees to benefit from the expertise and resources of some of the world’s leading companies. Together with Hannah Jones of Nike Inc, Jeffrey Sturchio of Merck & Co, Richard Golding of PricewaterhouseCoopers and David Arkless of Manpower Inc, De Smedt is taking advantage of a unique opportunity to witness at first hand the challenges facing refugees and the UNHCR staff who care for them.
Demand for Technology
Although UNHCR has been collaborating with private companies such as Microsoft for some time, Chamberlin’s launch of the CBL at the World Economic Forum in January 2005 began a new approach to partnership. The agency recently invited CBL members to participate in a week-long field mission that takes in camps in Kenya and Tanzania as well as accompanying a repatriation convoy travelling to Burundi. Chamberlin, who chairs the CBL, is leading the group.
Food and medicine remain the most urgent priorities in the camps, but there is also a strong demand for access to better education and technology from young people who, like Paul Majak, want to know more. In an attempt to meet this demand, Jibriil Ibrahim Ahmed set up the Sky Institute to teach computer skills to fellow refugees at Dadaab, but he acknowledges that resources are nowhere near sufficient to train everybody who wants to be trained. Given that the camp accommodates 127,000 refugees, this is hardly surprising.
Microsoft, says De Smedt, will be working to help initiatives such as Ahmed’s. “At the moment, the Sky Institute is working with four PCs in a tiny room that relies on electricity from the camp hospital. The challenge for us is to scale up this kind of initiative in a sustainable way. This means not only supplying more equipment though programmes such as the Microsoft Authorised Refurbishment programme, but also ensuring that more trained teachers are available to support an increased throughput of students.”
The second major issue for the Sky Institute, says De Smedt, is the lack of internet access. This is an inevitable consequence of high connectivity costs, which are typical of many developing countries. “To address this problem, it’s essential that the CBL reaches out to telecoms companies and tries to involve them in its work.”
New Dimension
The UNHCR, which relies heavily on voluntary donations, has long recognised that partnerships with private companies are vital in helping it to fulfil its mission.
“Business leaders recognise that many of the world’s problems today are multinational problems that need multinational solutions. They can do more to directly help refugees and also to help humanitarian organisations become more effective in delivering aid,” says Chamberlin.
Microsoft has enjoyed a cooperative relationship with UNHCR since 1999, when employee volunteers helped develop a new mobile refugee registration system for use during the Kosovo crisis. This system has since evolved into a standard global platform for recording refugee data and is being used at Tanzania’s Lukole camp, one of the destinations for the CBL mission. Recently, the scope of the partnership between the two organisations has broadened to cover technology in the community but now, with the CBL, it is acquiring a whole new dimension.
“Although a one-to-one partnership between Microsoft and UNHCR can achieve a great deal, the CBL enables us to work with other industry leaders to help the agency be even more effective,” points out De Smedt.
The CBL is focusing on three main areas: awareness-building and fund-raising; project implementation; and provision of general business expertise and advice. According to De Smedt, the chief strength of the council is that it enables companies from different industry areas to come together and apply complementary core competencies to help refugees. Microsoft, with its strong track record of using technology to address society’s big challenges, believes that it has a lot to offer.
Determination to Succeed
De Smedt sees Microsoft’s involvement in the CBL as a natural extension of its work with partners to close the digital divide and meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The company’s commitment is reflected in an extensive list of development projects already undertaken in East Africa. Several of these projects have received software and funding as part of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential programme, which aims to provide 250 million people worldwide with training and access to technology by 2010. Now, the stage is set for refugees to have access to the Unlimited Potential programme as well as other key initiatives such as Partners in Learning.
In the meantime, De Smedt will be returning to his Paris office with some valuable lessons, gleaned from speaking directly to refugees and those delivering support on the ground. For example, he is now keenly aware that programmes have to be tuned to specific local circumstances if they are to succeed. “People who are involved with global development programmes tend to assume that they will work everywhere, but that isn’t the case. This visit is giving me a sense for what does and doesn’t work when projects are carried out in the demanding conditions of these refugee camps.”
De Smedt is also keen to stress that although he has seen for himself how difficult life can be for some of the world’s two million refugees, there are grounds for optimism too. “I am impressed and touched by the positive attitude of so many of the young people I have met, and by their determination to make progress despite a lack of resources. The experience has reinforced my conviction that Microsoft, working in partnership with UNHCR and the other CBL members, can make a big difference to refugees’ lives.”
