At the second annual Techfugees Global Summit, a wide range of startups and entrepreneurs once again gathered to focus on how tech can help refugees.
Techfugees is a nonprofit that pulls together entrepreneurs and refugees to develop products and services that help migrants who have fled their homelands. The organization got its start in September 2015 as Europe was struggling to respond to the thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Northern Africa suddenly pouring across its borders.
The crisis inspired Techfugees founder and chair Mike Butcher, also a senior editor at TechCrunch, to ask on Facebook what the tech community could do in response. Since then, the organization has grown as it continues to organize refugee-themed hackathons under the day-to-day direction of CEO Joséphine Goube.
The second summit was held at Station F in Paris over two days and this year included a startup pitch competition across five categories: health, recruitment, education, social inclusion, and access to information.
The majority of the 25 startup finalists this year were founded by women, and in many cases by refugees.