Giving Compass' Take:

· Adele Peters reports that a new chatbot called Mona can be used through Facebook Messenger and Telegram to provide refugees with legal advice. 

· How is this app helping refugees through the resettlement process? How can this technology be spread to assist refugees around the world? 

· Read about four things you can do to support refugees. 

Using Facebook Messenger and Telegram, refugees can get important information from Mona much faster than emailing an aid organization.

For a Syrian refugee in Lebanon who is trying to navigate the legal path to resettlement, it can be difficult to find answers—and overstretched humanitarian organizations can take as long as three months to respond to an email when the demand for help is highest. A new chatbot called Mona, designed for Facebook Messenger and Telegram, can help more quickly.

“For us, it was about how could we get reliable information and services on the same platforms that refugees are already using, and reach them on their own terms with information and services that they could use when they actually need it most,” says Sarrah Nomanbhoy, one of the cofounders of Marhub, the startup that built the chatbot.

Nomanbhoy and cofounder Peter Wasserman began working on the concept as students at the University of California Berkeley, and saw the desperate need for a better solution on field visits to Greece and Lebanon, where people at some settlements ran up to them asking if they were lawyers who could help. One refugee in Greece told them that he had contacted 38 NGOs in Turkey—with no response—before contacting a smuggler, who responded within minutes.

In a pilot that began earlier this year with the legal aid organization International Refugee Assistance Project, 5,000 refugees used the new tool. In its first iteration, it helps prescreen refugees for the nonprofit, asking questions that can help determine if someone is eligible for resettlement.

“The challenge is really designing conversations that are built to be empathetic and conversational but that also gather the right information,” says Wasserman. One Syrian refugee in the U.S., who was concerned about his parents stuck in Lebanon, used the tool and learned that they could be eligible for family reunification through him; it explained the next steps to take. When a woman traveling with a heart condition used the chatbot and explained that she needed an operation, the program flagged her case to the nonprofit, which determined that she was eligible for resettlement.

Read the full article about legal advice for refugees through Facebook by Adele Peters at Fast Company.