EmpowerHack is a global volunteer design and technology collective focused on creating sustainable humanitarian technology for women and girls. We are currently on hiatus.
About us

In 2016 we are focused on women and child refugees. Despite up to 80% of world’s refugees being women and children, the problems faced by them are never at the forefront. EmpowerHack was born to change just that by taking collaborative design to scale with our collaborative incubator, powered by a network of tech-for-good partners.

Our four current design areas are health, child refugee rights, open access to education, and the Refugee Design Council.

Hababy
Helping pregnant refugee women on the go
Reproductive Health

Hababy is a prototype aimed at helping pregnant refugee women identify the top five red-flags of a pregnancy at risk and improve communications between medical personnel and the pregnant women they support.

Hababy has the potential to rapidly access women that need help under a intransit/refugee camp context. The project is exploring how lightweight information, such as quick identification of life-threatening pregnancy symptoms, a patient-owned health record and timely resources for medical professionals, can improve care. We are currently exploring how Hababy can bring a standardised approach to antenatal care for pregnant women in refugee camps.

This project is working with several partners including the Muslim Doctors Association.

Soul Medicine
Mental Health / Education

Soul Medicine is a mental well-being programme designed to reduce loneliness and depression by sending crowdsourced feel-good knowledge courses and quotes.

Soul Medicine is a crowdsourced SMS microeducation platform designed to overcome barriers to traditional learning environments. We crowdsource community-led content for short, engaging microcourses over SMS in multiple languages. Our goal is to create a self-sustaining vibrant community around “conversational education” with the tools that enable personal learning and build connections for psychosocial support and inclusion. We are currently open to both learners and volunteer educators interested in helping us test and improve Soul Medicine, with a closed pilot in human biology, launching October 2016.

Draw My Life
Supporting the rights of refugee children
Child Refugees

How can the humanitarian community strengthen and understand the voice of child refugees? Draw My Life is inspired by how childrens’ art therapy in the field can become a basis for better data around the needs and experience of refugee children.

Draw My Life provides a set of tools for field workers, the humanitarian community, and the public to understand, visualise and share the experience of refugee children. We are developing a web-based tool for field workers to easily and safely share child artwork and important, anonymised contextual data. This fall, Draw My Life will be partnering with child protection organisations like Terre Des Hommes and the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) to create the first data set of its kind to be contributed to the world’s largest repository for open humanitarian data as a call to action for both humanitarian organisations in the field to work together with the technology and data community to connect, visualise and amplify what we can learn from children and how to support their wellbeing and rights across the journey of migration.

This project is in partnership with: Terre Des Hommes, Novi Sad Humanitarian Centre (NSHC), Destination Unknown, Humanitarian Data Exchange (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and Women Hack for Non-Profits.

VocApp
Higher Education

VocApp an exciting new initiative with the Jamiya Project, which brings together higher education for Syrian refugees taught by Syrian academics in exile.

VocApp is a web and mobile platform where technical language for applied higher education, culturally effective learning methods, and social elements mix. Vocapp provides collaborative technical language support for students starting new courses in a second language in Europe and provides a mentoring discussion board to allow Syrian refugee students across Europe to ask questions and share common challenges in transition from learning in Arabic to a second language, monitored and contributed to by Syrian domain-experts.

This project is in partnership with the Jamiya Project.

Refugee Design Council
User / Community Centered Design

The Refugee Design Council is an exciting new refugee-led initiative to support technology-for-good communities to collaborate with refugee communities to design technologies in response to the refugee crisis.

Its role is to highlight the challenges faced by refugees and to create solutions using technology. It has three aims:

  • Engage the refugee committee to support and improve current refugee-technology projects
  • Curate and share other technology projects worldwide that work for refugees and their communities
  • Share the stories behind the people and experiences of what it’s like to be a part of designing technology, and not just using it, to encourage more inclusivity and diversity in technology