Would you give your smartphone to a refugee?
Last November, a few of us got together for the Techfugees hack to see if we could help the refugee crisis in a small way.
We discovered that refugees rely heavily on smartphones for information and to stay in contact with loved ones. The poorest refugees are leaving with nothing and we wanted to help get mobile phones to the least well off.
Most of us are lucky to be able to upgrade our smartphones regularly and in fact a lot of people have unused but perfectly good devices sitting in a drawer at home.
During the hack we developed GeeCycle.org which allows you to donate your old smartphone when you’ve upgraded to the latest brand spanking new one. Site owners can install a small snippet of code that detects visits from the very latest devices and prompts these visitors to donate their old smartphones.
GeeCycle.org is fully up and running as we have now partnered with a brilliant social enterprise called Impossible, who will process and deliver your old phone to whoever needs it the most — we’re currently distributing smartphones to refugees on the Greek island of Samos.
Here’s how you can help:
- Please like and share this post
- If you have an old smartphone, donate it → http://www.geecycle.org/donate
- If you own a site, add the widget → http://www.geecycle.org/get-the-widget
Thank you!
Will
