A $1,000 Ikea House For Refugees

Mundane business know-how combats gut-wrenching human tragedy.
Ikea Foundation and Graphic News

Making sure that there’s enough shelter available for populations displaced by war is a challenge of cost and scale. Fortunately, challenges of cost and scale are something businesses can be really good at. Ikea, best known for making assemble-at-home furniture for poor college kids and divorced men, has a charitable arm, the Ikea Foundation, that’s working with the UN Refugee Agency to test new, better, easily assembled shelters for refugees.

The shelter pictured above costs around $1,000 and can house a family of five. It even includes a solar panel that powers both a lamp and a USB outlet. A handful of the shelters have been tested in Ethiopia, as well as in camps in Iraq and Lebanon designed for Syrian refugees.

The video below shows a shelter being assembled:

 

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Kelsey D. Atherton Avatar

Kelsey D. Atherton

Contributor, Tech

Kelsey D. Atherton is a military technology journalist who has contributed to Popular Science since 2013. He covers uncrewed robotics and other drones, communications systems, the nuclear enterprise, and the technologies that go into planning, waging, and mitigating war.