Help Venezuelans with digital and media literacy

Summary: In the last 5 years due to the social, economic and political crisis in Venezuela, the number of Venezuelans who have left the country amounts to 4 million according to figures from the UN Refugee Agency and the IOM. Of these, 1.3 million have arrived to Colombia, and the department of Antioquia is the fifth recipient with close to 72,000, according to data from Colombia Migration. This situation has also affected other neighboring countries such as Brazil and the Region.

This same entity indicates that until January of this year, Venezuelans with PEP (Special Permission to Stay) in the department, the majority, 31,268, are between 18 and 29 years old.

Our goal is to improve the living conditions of migrants by democratizing and facilitating access to information to opportunities and resourses that allow them to meet their basic human development needs. If we build the platform to spread and connect the humanitarian aid with the people needing it, the need of efforts done by all sides working in humanitarian crisis will be reduced, improving the life conditions of migrants currently in need, and other communities that might need help in the future.

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Three meet-ups were held to analyze the information needs, current uses and sources of information to which Venezuelans have access, where they connect to the internet, which media they use, which associations they know and in general, how they find out about the different activities or actions available in the city of Medellín.

After identifying the needs, Makaia in association with Alpha Lumen (organization based in Brazil) started developing a mobile application in which Venezuelans can access reliable and geo-referenced information from organizations (previously validated) that are providing support on issues such as health, education, culture, housing, jobs, and more.

A pre-release event of the app was held in Sao Paulo on October 11 of 2019, where social organizations and students could see advances of the development of the app.

In order to help to maximixe the impact of the project, several meetings with social organizations in Medellín took place since the beginning of the project, building a database of offers of humanitarian help in Medellín and receiving feedback of the organizations to ease the app development as a win-win tool to the people in need and the organizations offering humanitarian help.

Furthermore, digital literacy workshops are planned in order to help the people in need access valuable information using internet. The date for these workshops and also the release date of the app are pending due the national calendar of restrictions in movility programmed for march and april of 2020 to prevent COVID19 spreading.

We as Makaia expect that this project will help the most migrant people in need of humanitarian help as possible, also helping the NGOs to get to their target audiencies, aiming to spread the wellbeing and dignified life for those in need.

¡Don’t miss any detail of this trip of bringing humanitarian help with technology!