The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of people who have been forced to flee.

In more than five decades, the agency has helped millions of people restart their lives. They include refugees, returnees, stateless people, the internally displaced and asylum-seekers. Today, UNHCR employs 17,878 people in 132 countries to help over 82 million forcibly displaced people word-wide. To help and protect some of the world’s most vulnerable people in so many places and types of environment, UNHCR must purchase goods and services worldwide. For further information on UNHCR, its mandate and operations, please see http://www.unhcr.org/.

UNHCR has piloted various Internet of Things (IOT) real-time water and sanitation monitoring technologies in refugee settings in Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Iraq and Rwanda. These pilots have shown that real-time digital monitoring using Long Range Wide Area Networks  (LoRaWAN) offers huge potential to benefit humanitarian operations: to ensure programmes are operating efficiently; to track value for money; to reduce financial and material fraud; to ensure oversight in inaccessible hard to reach locations or highly fluid and complex insecure environments (or during lockdown due to COVID-19); to ensure that UNHCR is monitoring the impact of their operations on the environment (especially groundwater abstraction); to ensure accountability to donors, local authorities, and host governments; and to ensure refugees are receiving their rights to assistance in a timely and adequate manner.