Giving Compass' Take:

• Immigrants and refugees rely on their cell phones to communicate with family and friends and use very few apps. 

• How can innovators make technology that incorporates refugees' needs and is more accurately suited to their lifestyle? 

• Read about the downside of using technology to help refugees. 

Shelly Culbertson learned how valuable a phone can be from a cab driver threading his way through the streets of Beirut.

She's a senior researcher at RAND. He was a refugee from Syria who had lost almost everything to the civil war there. As they chatted, he brought out his phone to show her pictures of a home that no longer stood, and a life that no longer existed.

“It was really striking to me,” said Culbertson, who has spent years working in the Middle East and elsewhere to improve the lives of refugees like him. “Here's this person who's displaced, impoverished. He's lost his home. And yet, he still manages to have a smartphone, because it holds his history, his identity. He's able to use that phone as a lifeline, not just to communicate with friends and family, but to maintain his past.”

The experience stuck with her. Back at RAND, she teamed up with a researcher who had fled Greece as a child to look at how displaced people around the world use technology—and how technology could better serve them. The research spanned four continents, drew upon scores of interviews, and came to one inescapable conclusion: There's a disconnect between what displaced people need, and what investors and innovators think they need.

The United Nations has called the past ten years the decade of displacement. Nearly 71 million people have fled conflict and persecution, filtering into cities far from home or crowding into refugee camps. Almost one in every 100 people around the world is now a refugee, an asylum seeker, or otherwise displaced by force or fear.

The mobile phone has become such a vital part of their lives that refugees have been known to trade food rations for airtime and data. A recent survey found that refugees often prioritize their phone and internet connections above education, clothing, and health care. As one interviewee told RAND researchers, “Their phone is all they have left.”

Read the full article about technology for refugees by Doug Irving at RAND.