International Rescue Committee
Child Connect Refugee Tracing Project
Date Initiated: May 1999

This grant to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) was used to develop and implement the Child Connect program for refugees as well as the Kosovar Family Finder, a project that provided refugees with location information for displaced family and friends.

Child Connect is a software-based system designed to assist humanitarian agencies in their efforts to reunify separated children with their families. It allows users in different locations to input child tracing forms and parent tracing requests; to search for children and parents; to view and print photos; communicate with other users; and to follow-up on these efforts.

The Kosovar Family Finder Project consolidated all family location information that was made public into a database-driven directory. Ten thousand copies of the directory (listing the locations of approximately 20,000 families representing 120,000 Kosovars in 23 countries) was distributed in mid-June, 1999 in Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo.