The Inter-Agency Guiding Principles on Unaccompanied and Separated Children (2004) underline the importance of identifying, registering and documenting unaccompanied and separated children as quickly as possible in an emergency context, whether a natural disaster or an armed conflict. Family Tracing and Reunification (FTR) has traditionally relied on outdated methods of registration, with data being recorded on paper and later entered into a database system. This results in precious hours and days being lost in efforts to reunite children with their caregivers. RapidFTR is an open source, volunteer-driven project, under active development by UNICEF, which has received funding from the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and UNICEF Supply Division. It is a versatile open-source mobile phone application and data storage system that seeks to expedite the FTR process by helping humanitarian workers collect, sort and share information about unaccompanied and separated children in emergency situations so they can be registered for care services and reunited with their families.
It is specifically designed to streamline and speed up FTR efforts both in the immediate aftermath of a crisis and during ongoing recovery efforts. It allows for quick input of a child's essential details and photo and this information is uploaded to a central database whenever network access becomes available so workers can register children in their care, and search existing entries to help distressed parents find their missing children. UNICEF has been field-testing RapidFTR in Uganda since 2012 in partnership with UNHCR, ICRC, URCS, and Save the Children, and since mid 2013 in South Sudan. The hope is that this tool can be used by all child protection and humanitarian organizations, and that it can be adapted to apply more broadly to document vulnerable children in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes, including at health services, schools and as part of civil registry systems. This case study by UNICEF’s Country office in Uganda, illustrates how RapidFTR has been used to reunite three children who fled the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo with their families.
©UNICEF Child Protection in Emergencies Team and UNICEF Uganda
