According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 65.6 million individuals have been forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. These are the highest levels of displacement on record.

Fortunately, thanks to ongoing global humanitarian efforts, refugee camps exist around the world that provide millions of displaced men, women, and children with access to basic necessities such as food, water, sanitation, health care, and even Wi-Fi.

In fact, an article that was published earlier this year by Newsweek, highlighted comments made by Kaan Terzioglu, the CEO of Turkish mobile phone operator Turkcell, who pointed to the fact that refugees are increasingly asking for access to Wi-Fi before asking for access to any other basic and vital amenities.

“The first thing a refugee asks for upon arrival at a camp is not water or food, but the Wi-Fi password,” Terzioglu said while at a session of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last January.
Terzioglu went on to note that digital technologies have become a basic humanitarian need because they provide displaced individuals the ability to instantly connect with loved ones that they have been separated from. “In the upcoming period, we need to use what the digital technologies have offered in an effort to find effective solutions to the refugee crisis,” Terzioglu stated.

These comments echoed the findings from a 2017 report conducted by the Migration Policy Institute titled, “A Global Broadband Plan for Refugees.” The report emphasized and assessed the significant as well as invaluable role that communications technologies can play in facilitating protection solutions for refugees, both in transit and at destination.

The authors of the brief ultimately proposed the framework for the creation of a global broadband plan for refugees, that through careful scoping of localized challenges and alignment of refugee connectivity efforts with host-country broadband strategies and market forces, strives to improve broadband connectivity for the world’s more than 22 million refugees and the communities that host them.

As the report underlines, access to Wi-Fi will not solve every single problem pertaining to the ongoing refugee crisis. However, many of the issues refugees and their host countries face can be at the very least mitigated and made easier to solve if connectivity gaps are closed.