The Amazing World of Mutual Aid
How aidx will use technology to empower refugees
Tarig Hilal and Gerard Mc Hugh
Zeinab is twenty-five. A scholarship student, she lives with four friends in a cramped flat in Nairobi. She is a refugee.
A few months ago she fell off the back of a motorbike and injured her leg. With no insurance and no money to spare, she was only able to afford her hospital bills by reaching out via Whatsapp to a group of friends who had come together to help each other in just this kind of emergency.
Thanks to this network she was able to get the treatment she needed and is now back on her feet and back at school. Not everyone in her situation is so fortunate but research conducted by aidx found that the support system that she turned to in her time of need is surprisingly common.
In over a hundred hours of in-depth interviews with dozens of Somali, South Sudanese and Syrian refugees we were introduced to the extraordinary world of mutual aid. A powerful, complex and sophisticated eco system of self help, that is both key to peoples survival and far ahead of the technologies that support it.
The refugee experience
The refugee experience is one of the defining tragedies of our era, affecting millions of people across the world. Today there are over sixty-five million people displaced from their homes, one third of these, are refugees.[1]
The popular image of refugees is dominated by the story of “the journey”. Terrified souls fleeing the horrors of a bombed out city, boats full of women, children and men bobbing precariously on the open sea, camps in Kos, Lesbos and Calais temporary and ramshackle, offering safety and food.
This however, is only a small, albeit heart wrenching part of a larger story. In reality the majority of refugees are displaced for years, with a full fifty percent in exile for five years or more and most people forced to flee their country escape to neighbouring countries [2]. Today half of all refugees actually live in towns and cities.[3]
The humanitarian system of support
These are circumstances for which the current humanitarian model is ill suited. Born out of the crisis of World War Two, the global refugee response system is built for short term assistance. It is designed to put people in camps, clothe them, house them and feed them, helping them back to their place of origin as soon as possible.
It is a model of intervention that is necessary in the short term but unsustainable when stretched over years, creating dependency and frustration.
Even if this system worked perfectly though, there is not enough money for it to address the scope of the problem, nor the political will to sustain it. In 2016 the UN estimated a fifteen billion dollar funding gap for humanitarian action and [4] the refugee crisis in Europe has drawn an increasing amount of money away from the majority of people who are displaced in their regions of origin. [5] Increasingly donor countries simply do not have the political will to continue supporting refugee camps year after year.
This is in part why Zeinabs’ story is so common. In circumstances of prolonged expatriation, absent external support, motivated by habit, tradition and faith, people do what they have done since time immemorial, they help themselves and they help one another.
The amazing world of mutual aid
By its nature this type of mutual aid is hard to quantify, and there is a dearth of research on the subject. But common sense, observation and some powerful indicative data suggest that if one could attach a monetary figure to it, it would be substantially more than anything offered by the international community.
Let’s take remittances as one potential indicator. According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2016, total remittances to the 20 countries receiving the most international humanitarian assistance was approximately US $69.3 billion. That is over five times greater than US $13.4billion in total humanitarian assistance received by these countries.[6]
But remittances are only a part of the story. We learned about a thriving eco system in which money and in kind support were generated, pooled, loaned and borrowed in ways that were essential to peoples survival. People talked about this system offering a degree of autonomy and dignity, in circumstances which can deny both.
Whilst our research focussed on urban refugees, it offers a glimpse of what is happening in the broader refugee community, uncovering an amazing world of mutual aid and self help.
Pooling, borrowing, loaning and giving
Virtually everyone we interviewed was involved in some system of financial pooling or sharing, often across international borders. The systems that people set up varied from the simple, a loan to a friend, to the complex, such as a pooling group that involved a dozen people, with clear rules and payment terms and the explicit purpose of providing support in medical emergencies.
Others had set up groups for educational purposes. One group of students at the University of Nairobi, contributed on a monthly basis to raise funds for a scholarship for fellow refugees, which they duly advertised, interviewed for and selected against a clear criteria. Another group created a pool of money to provide small loans for business ventures and another set up a fund to help them when they had to pay the costs of police internment (a regular problem for young Somali men).
For people surviving on less than five dollars a day, the frequency of financial generosity and mutual support far exceeded our expectations.
Giving to those less well off was common. A group of young men and women had set up a fund to raise money for people affected by the drought in Somalia and everyone we spoke to felt it their responsibility to help out with friends and family when they could. Sharing and pooling were the default position, people thought about, planned for their money and resources collectively first, individually second, not purely out of virtue, but out of necessity too. It was for many, the only way to get by.
The role of technology
Technology played an interesting role in the these systems. By dint of their legal circumstances refugees often struggle to access financial services and where they do they are complicated, slow and expensive to use. The result is a social technology that often exists largely off line and is in many ways far more advanced than the services that exist to support it.
The best served by technology where the Somali refugees in Kenya, with a relative wealth of options for sending and receiving money, including Mpesa and Dahabshil amongst the most well known.
But even amongst Somali refugees there were substantial frustrations. Many people described Mpesa charges as being too high and often hard to predict. Sending and receiving money internationally was not only costly, but difficult, time consuming, and at times risky, since it requires trips to local offices while transporting cash which makes a tempting target for thieves, or authorities who will overlook the lack of proper documentation for the right incentive.
WhatsApp was commonly used as a coordinating tool, with pooling groups forming chat groups to communicate. But whenever possible, people operated offline financially, using cash to avoid losing money to fees.
Despite severe restrictions on economic activity, a large number of people whom we interviewed found a way to make money, from selling fried chips by the side of the road, to hustling for what ever legal jobs were available. Those who could not find a way to make money were often dependent on friends and family. All of those who had income had others who were dependent upon them in some fashion.
A sharing economy
The systems that we saw did not end with money though. What we found was a sharing economy that encompassed every aspect of life, so that sharing was the default position for almost all activity.
In addition to pooling financial resources, people exchanged in kind support in a multitude of other ways. Mothers offered each other child care, students went back to the refugee camps to teach the subjects that they learnt in the city, friends shared food, clothes and shelter.
No one described this system of mutual support as easy. Despite strong practical, social and religious incentives people often described the processes of sharing, lending, borrowing and pooling to be both stressful and complicated. Trust was often broken and expectations misaligned.
Moreover the support provided by these systems was by no means evenly distributed. The better connected were better off and those with fewer connections struggled the most. A number of refugees whom we interviewed had almost no friends or family to support them. Some of the most heart-breaking stories came from this group, cases of rape and human trafficking, entire families killed.
Ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges
One of the simplest insights were the issues that people struggled with. Being a refugee for years on end means that extreme crisis slowly morphs into mundane, but in their own way, no less pressing struggles: how to make a living, get an education, pay the rent, foot a medical bill, look after ageing parents, or raise a wayward son. In other words, refugees face the same struggles we all do, but in circumstances that are far more difficult.
To be a refugee is to be absent some of the most basic rights and opportunities; the right to travel freely, to work, to hold a bank account, to own a home, or build a future. People are in this situation not for weeks or months, but years, sometimes decades. In so many ways the people we spoke to were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
Our commitment
aidx begins from this starting point. There is a powerful system of mutual aid in refugee communities that is understudied and under-supported, yet essential to peoples survival. It has existed for a long time, but is easily forgotten in the global effort to confront the many humanitarian crises happening today. We want to help change that.
We plan to design and test products that build upon the complex and imperfect patchwork of social and technical systems that people in crisis have developed to cope with adversity. We believe that if we take the time to understand these systems and work directly with people in crisis, together we can find solutions that address some of the challenges. Put simply: we want to help people help themselves.
To do this we will spend 2018 exploring a whole range of exciting ideas, including no-fee digital pooling services, peer-to-peer lending tools, digital currencies, smartphone-based lending agreements, and digital identities and designing prototypes grounded in the day to day realities that refugees face.
Our commitment is to be obsessively people centred and to build products that people need and want. Instead of thinking of refugees as dependents and victims, we are focused on their agency, and will think of them not as beneficiaries but as customers, albeit customers in some pretty tough circumstances.
We believe this path will lead to tangible, sustainable improvements in peoples’ lives, and lessen some of the extreme difficulty people are facing because they were forced to flee their country and community.
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References
[1] Betts, Bloom, Kaplan & Omata, Refugee Economies, Oxford 2016 p1
[2] Betts and Collier Refuge, Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Allen and Lane 2017 p130
[3] Betts and Collier Refuge, Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Allen and Lane 2017 p140
[4] High Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing, Report to the United Nations Secretary General, Too Important to Fail, Addressing the Humanitarian Financing Gap, January 2016
[5] Betts and Collier Refuge, Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Allen and Lane 2017 p129
[6] Development Initiatives, “Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2016.” 2016. p25.
