The International Rescue Committee
Making critical information about food, water, and shelter accessible.
When people’s lives are turned upside down by a crisis, every moment counts when it comes to sending them assistance.
A team of 15 Google.org Fellows helped further develop Signpost, the International Rescue Committee’s scalable solution to address arising refugee crises, and simultaneously built United for Ukraine (a new instance of Signpost) to deliver life-saving information to over 7M Ukrainian refugees affected by the ongoing crisis.
“With help from Google.org Fellows, we were able to rapidly broaden the reach of a digital platform for Ukrainian refugees, at a time when there was no time to spare. In just 3 months they helped us achieve half of our entire roadmap for the next 5 years.”
– David Miliband,
CEO at International Rescue Committee
How the Google.org Fellows helped
- Expanded the coverage of United for Ukraine to over 25 countries, with the top 70 FAQs covered in 3 languages, and engaged over 15 partners for psychological support, education, employment and community services.
- Helped create design iterations based on user experience interviews with refugees.
- Worked to build the infrastructure that makes Signpost scalable to all future instances, including reusable UI components and tools.
Impact of the project
- Shortened the time to launch future Signpost Instances from weeks to just 1-2 days. So now people impacted by a crisis can get potentially lifesaving information much faster.
- United for Ukraine helped over 11K refugees find accommodation, supported nearly 5K legal queries by matching submissions with legal service providers, and handled over 200K unique visitors.