Everyone has the right to know where their family is.

This belief is at the core of REFUNITE, a nonprofit tech organization whose mission is to reconnect refugee families across the globe with missing loved ones. When families are separated, they put them back in touch. They empower refugees and displaced people to take the search for missing loved ones into their own hands, whether through a mobile phone, a computer or one of their free help lines.

Today, there are over 65.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, a large percentage of whom have lost contact with family members or friends in their escape from disasters, persecutions, or conflicts. All too often families end up in different parts of the world, afraid, alienated and alone.

REFUNITE’s long-standing partnerships with Ericsson, various mobile network operators, and the United Nations, have allowed them to collaborate on the pervasive problem of family separation among forcibly displaced populations, to witness the effects of these separations, and to refine their approach to reconnect loved ones. Through these partnerships, REFUNITE has set out to change the process of family tracing. By creating a user friendly, online global database of over 600,000 profiles, users can now search for their missing loved ones with the click of a button.

REFUNITE is a fully independent technology based non-profit organization with projects in the following countries: Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). REFUNITE has also partnered with Facebook’s Free Basics service, which has made access to REFUNITE’s platform for free in 14 countries: Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South Africa, Niger, Rwanda, Liberia, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, Malawi, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, and Ghana.