The Refugee Board

• An online refugee board for refugees to post their status for their family, friends or loved ones back home to check.

• Created as a project for the MEGA Hackathon 2023 by Syed Hisham Akmal & Sayed Afnan Khazi

What is the problem we are trying to solve?

• Refugees are often separated from their family, friends or loved ones during their journey to a safe place. They are often unable to contact them due to lack of resources or communication. This leads to a lot of stress and anxiety for both the refugees and their family, friends or loved ones.

• The Refugee Board is an online platform for refugees to post their status for their family, friends or loved ones back home to check. This will help them to stay connected and reduce the stress and anxiety.

How does The Refugee Board work?

• The Refugee Board is a simple web application that allows refugees to post their status for their family, friends or loved ones back home to check.

1. A refugee, on arriving to a camp can contact a designated volunteer on the camp to post a message on The Refugee Board.

2. The volunteer on the camp has access to a page that allows them to add/delete/update the information of the refugees that come and go from their camp and their message to their loved ones.

• Family members and friends back home can simply look up the name of their loved ones who are travelling and check the message that they have put up on the board.

• The Refugee Board also keeps a track of the number of refugees that are currently in each camp. This data can be helpful to any organisation that is trying to help refugees and help them get the supplies they need.

I am a refugee, how do I use The Refugee Board?

• If you are a refugee, you can simply contact a volunteer on the camp you are staying at and ask them to post a message on The Refugee Board for you.

I am a volunteer, how do I use The Refugee Board?

• If you work at a camp and would like to use The Refugee Board for your camp, you can signup for a camp account by going to the login page and signing up.

• Once you are verified (by an overlooking authority, such as the UN), you can login to your account and add the information of the refugees and their message to their loved ones.

• If you are a volunteer, you can simply go to the camp dashboard page and add the information of the refugee and attach their message to their loved ones.

I am a family member or friend of a refugee, how do I use The Refugee Board?

• If you are a family member or friend of a refugee, you can simply go to the search page and search for the name of your loved one(s).

• If they have posted a message on The Refugee Board, you will be able to see it along with their camp name, location, and the time it was posted.

How do I run The Refugee Board?

• As of now, The Refugee Board is not hosted anywhere. You can run it locally by cloning the repository and running the frontend and backend separately.

How was The Refugee Board built?

• The Refugee Board was built using React+Vite along with TailWindCSS on the frontend. It uses Flask as an API, Redis for session management, and MySQL as a database on the backend.

What are the future plans for The Refugee Board?

• We hope to host The Refugee Board on a server and make it available for everyone to use.

• We also hope to add more features to The Refugee Board, such as a chat system for refugees to chat with their family, friends or loved ones.

• Overall, we hope to make The Refugee Board a useful tool for refugees and their family, friends or loved ones.

How can I contribute to The Refugee Board?

• You can contribute to The Refugee Board by forking the repository and making a pull request.
• Please contact the developers about your idea/change before you put you awesome work into it. 😃

How can I contact the developers of The Refugee Board?

• You can contact the developers of The Refugee Board by sending an email to therefugeeboard@gmail.com

• You can also directly contact the developers:

• Sayed Afnan Khazi

  • LinkedIn
  • Email

• Syed Hisham Akmal

  • LinkedIn
  • Email