How young Lebanese devs are tackling their country's Syrian refugee crisis

What started with a Siri-like chatbot to provide localized refugee information led to various UN agencies backing the idea of a hackathon to develop tech to help in Syria's humanitarian crisis. By February this year, Lebanon was hosting about 1.1 million refugees from neighboring Syria, which amounted to about one in five people in the country, according to Amnesty International. Since then the numbers have continued to grow. Alongside those figures, 4.8 million Syrian refugees are registered with UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. With Syria's civil war and the resulting humanitarian crisis showing no signs of abating, one Lebanon-based US entrepreneur, Mike Clarke, director of The Humanitarian Innovation Lab, is working with agencies like UNHCR, UNICEF, and OCHA "to inspire and cultivate new technologies that can quickly improve the current response to the refugee crisis in Lebanon".