Before a Refugee Can Access Anything Else, They Need to Be Online

The humanitarian case for connecting displaced populations is usually framed around communication — reaching family, accessing news, staying informed. Those benefits are real, but they sit downstream of something more foundational. For displaced people, connectivity is the prerequisite that makes most other interventions work.

Access to aid registration increasingly runs through digital platforms. Education for displaced children depends on connectivity when physical schools are unavailable or unsafe. Employment searches require internet access. 

Legal information about asylum processes, resettlement timelines, and rights documentation — the material that determines whether a displaced person can stabilize their situation — is predominantly online. Without reliable internet access, a displaced person is structurally excluded from the digital systems that humanitarian response increasingly depends on. The isolation isn't just social. It's systemic.

The scale of the gap is documented. GSMA, ITU, and UNHCR have jointly set a target of reliable connectivity for 20 million forcibly displaced people by 2030, a goal that reflects how far current access falls from what's needed for displaced populations to participate in modern digital systems. 

The barriers aren't primarily technical. Unreliable electricity, unaffordable devices, limited digital literacy, and regulatory environments that complicate mobile connectivity in hosting countries are the actual obstacles in most displacement contexts. 

A person might be within range of a mobile tower and still unable to access it because they lack a recognized identity document to register a SIM, or because data costs are prohibitive on a humanitarian stipend, or because the device they could afford doesn't support the local network standard.

Tech for Refugees approaches these barriers with a specific operating thesis: that digital connectivity is infrastructure, not a supplement to other humanitarian services. The initiative, founded by Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, works from the position that the organizations delivering education, healthcare, legal support, and economic opportunity to displaced populations can't achieve their goals if the people they serve are offline. Connectivity doesn't compete with those services for priority. It's the layer that makes them accessible.

The Giving Pledge commitment Milner made in 2012 included an explicit focus on causes where technology and human need intersect. the initiative is the most direct expression of that focus in the humanitarian space. MTN Group signed a multi-year MOU with UNHCR in March 2026 targeting connectivity expansion specifically in Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan — a signal that the infrastructure approach is gaining commercial partners with the operational scale to implement it across entire markets, not just pilot areas.

UNHCR's own research consistently shows that digital inclusion for displaced people accelerates self-reliance — connected refugees find employment faster, access services more effectively, and integrate into host communities more successfully than those without access. The World Bank has documented similar findings across multiple displacement contexts. These aren't abstract projections. They're measured outcomes from programs where connectivity was treated as a precondition rather than an afterthought.

What makes the infrastructure framing significant is what it implies about how solutions should be designed. If connectivity is one service among many, it gets funded and evaluated like a service — on utilization rates, coverage numbers, cost per user. If it's infrastructure, it gets evaluated on what it enables. Schools that reach children in settlements where no teacher is present. Health information platforms that function in multiple languages and don't require a fixed address. Legal aid chatbots that can explain an asylum process to someone who has never had reliable internet access before. None of those services work at scale without the layer beneath them. The infrastructure framing is the one that makes the investment legible.

The Eureka Manifesto frames scientific and technological progress as a collective mission, one where the benefits should reach everyone. Tech for Refugees is an expression of that frame applied to one of the most immediate and tractable gaps in how technology's benefits are currently distributed. Connectivity doesn't solve displacement. It doesn't end conflict or reverse the conditions that force people from their homes. What it does is make every other intervention more likely to work — and in the practical logic of humanitarian response, that's reason enough to treat it as the first problem to solve.