By Rana Novack, Offering Owner, IBM Refugee & Migration Predictive Analytics
“Do you really think we would do anything differently?”
It’s a question I’m asked repeatedly, and one that I’ve struggled with often as war’s veil of grief and destruction has slowly, cruelly fallen over my family in Syria.
As my relatives have dispersed to whichever corner of the world they could safely reach, I’ve hoped and prayed that people – policy makers, immigration officers, the whole world, sometimes even my relatives themselves – would have done things differently. It’s a question I’ve asked myself in hindsight when I’ve been disappointed, time and time again.
I am a first-generation Syrian American, and since the war began I’ve realized that almost everything I thought I knew about refugees and how the world responds to them was wrong. Here’s what I’ve learned as I’ve had to re-think what it means to be displaced by conflict — and what we can do about it.
1. It’s not them — it’s us. My first mistake was thinking everything would be fine. Maybe I was just hopeful. When the protests began, I thought the unrest would pass quickly. When it turned violent, I was worried, but I thought, “It’s isolated to a few far away areas.” Then, the violence spread, and it became clear that it wasn’t just going to go away. I also realized that what was happening in Syria, to people I loved, could happen anywhere to anyone. For so long, I had thought of refugees as them. Now, it was us.
2. There’s no place like home. My second mistake was thinking anyone would want to leave. One night, when the violence had been intense near my family’s neighborhood, I was speaking with my aunt in Syria, tearfully pleading with her to leave. I’ll never forget what she said next: that she couldn’t because her daughter had a doctor’s appointment.
I was speechless. Was it worth risking your life for a doctor’s appointment? But then, something shifted, and I understood in a way I hadn’t before: It wasn’t as simple as just getting out. How do you make the choice to take your children and go, not knowing when they would next see a doctor? How do you leave the only place, the only life, you have ever known? There I was, asking her to leave, from the safety of my home without the slightest understanding of what I was suggesting in asking her to leave her own.
Because there wasn’t a safe way out, in many ways leaving had become a greater risk than staying. And while millions have left, they have done so at great personal risk and sacrifice.
3. We’re confined by our own constructs. My third mistake was thinking they could go, even if they wanted to. When my relatives did finally make the impossible choice to leave, every visa they applied for was denied. I realized it wasn’t the conflict keeping them confined; it was the rest of the world that had closed their doors. There was no plan, no established pathway to safety — and people were dying either because of the conflict or on the way out.
Reimagining a refugee crisis
At the time, I was working at IBM and learning about predictive modeling, analytics, and cognitive computing. I began wondering if there might be a way to apply predictive technology to a refugee crisis. What if we had seen this coming? What could we have done differently?
Clearly, we would have had an opportunity. In a connected, cognitive world, we could analyze trends in data, learn from past migrations, and respond proactively, making policy decisions ahead of time, deploying humanitarian resources early, and establishing safe exit routes.
That vision became the basis of IBM’s Refugee & Migration Predictive Analytics Solution prototype. It’s a tool to determine where people are going and how they are getting there, and to look for trends and correlations in data to help identify the drivers of a migration to empower government agencies and humanitarian organizations with the right information ahead of time. The IBM Foundation is now working with the Danish Refugee Council to refine the solution in support of future humanitarian crises.
I can hear it now: "But even if we had perfect information … do you really think we would do anything differently?”
And my answer is: Of course I do.
Isn’t that what technology is for? It exists to make our world smarter, to help solve tough, complex challenges, to enable insight, and more informed decision making. But building technology-based solutions is only part of the answer. It’s up to us to act on the information and insights they provide. It’s up to us to be responsible, decent, and human.
In the age of technological disruption, we have the tools to disrupt displacement. We can evolve our measure of success for a refugee crisis response from basic survival and expand our focus to other diaspora-related issues — pandemics, climate, famine, the global economy — exponentially driving technology to serve humanity.
In honor of World Refugee Day on June 20, let’s rethink how we support populations in crisis. Let’s commit to making a concerted effort to applying technology responsibly for the more than 65 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and the millions who may soon follow them. Then, maybe we won’t do anything differently – we’ll do everything differently.
Watch the video below to learn more.
This post is sponsor content from IBM and was created by IBM and Insider Studios.