We’ve blogged before about the growing role of mobile phones in economic development; now the phones will be used to deliver food aid as well. The World Food Program (WFP) recently announced that it will begin texting food vouchers to 1,000 Iraqi refugee families in Syria. The vouchers can be exchanged for rice, wheat flour, lentils, chickpeas, oil, canned fish, cheese, and eggs at certain stores. Emilia Casella, the WFP spokesperson, told reporters that all of the 130,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria receiving food aid already have mobile phones: “We’re currently providing news about distributions on mobile phone messages to the 130,000 caseload right now.” (HT: F.P. Passport)[%comments]
Phones But No Food
TAGS:
and 
. You can also watch it on 
As the regional spokesperson for the World Food Programme in Iraq and Syria, I would like to clarify a couple of points. Firstly, the vast majority of the Iraqi refugees in Syria come from an urban background; they are not living in camps, but in apartments in Damascus and other cities. They left Iraq with their life savings, so it is perfectly natural that they have mobile phones. Their problem is that they have no incomes and their savings have dwindled and largely disappeared, hence the need for food assistance. The SIM cards are provided as an in-kind donation to WFP from the service provider and are given only to families registered with UNHCR. They cannot be exchanged, as they are coded to match an individual identity. Thus, the risk of fraud is minimised. The great advantage of the system is that it gives the families flexibility on the type of food and quantity that they purchase at any given time and reduces the burden for WFP in organising monthly or two-monthly distributions. The vouchers can only be used in specific food stores that have the technology to apply the system and can only be used to redeem specific food items, not for example tobacco or alcohol.
Hi
Mobile phones are becoming affordable and applicable day by day. One had argued “why we assumed poor refugees have mobile when they do not have food”
But as per Robin the selected group of refugees is not like the other refugees in developing countries.
So, let’s see what the outcome of this initiative is without coming to early conclusions.
-Sameera.
http://ict4d-in-srilanka.blogspot.com/
It is also entirely possible (likely?) that the families involved could be sharing mobile phones within the community. If the UNHCR is supplying the SIM cards, all a family has to do is swap the SIM card into a shared phone, get the voucher number, then swap it out for the next family’s SIM.
Though I agree that the ready availability of mobile phones in the ‘developing world’ makes it possible that each family could also conceivably own their own phone without needing to share.