Case Study: Urban Refuge (Boston University) achieves mobile access to local aid with Microsoft Azure

Connecting the disconnected with aid

Urban Refuge is a Boston University–born nonprofit that set out to help urban refugees—who make up a large share of the global displaced population—find local aid beyond the informal, often inaccurate word-of-mouth networks they’d been relying on. With a small student-led team and limited coding experience, the organization needed an easy-to-use, multilingual mobile solution to connect refugees with services and locations in their cities.

Working with Microsoft experts, Urban Refuge built a cross‑platform mobile app (Xamarin.Forms front end, ASP.NET Core back end) hosted on Azure with Azure AD B2C authentication, a SQL Server database of 160+ geo‑tagged organizations, and Visual Studio App Center/HockeyApp and VSTS for testing and deployment. The bilingual app and management portal enable rapid updates, usage analytics to prioritize resources, and a pilot rollout in Amman, Jordan (targeting an estimated 650,000 Syrian refugees), with plans to scale the open‑source solution to other refugee populations worldwide.

Urban Refuge

Sara Mejias

Co-Founder and CEO