Overview
The Swedish furniture design company has been featured in your home decor porn pile, your house (online shopping, holla), and now they're also making sure that refugees have something a wee bit more homely to call, well, home.
World, meet Better Shelter, the flat pack lightweight units which were developed under a partnership between the IKEA Foundation and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The units have been successfully beta tested among refugee families in Ethiopia, Iraq, and Lebanon, and as of this week IKEA has gone into production for 10,000 units.
The 188-square-foot shelters are a bit revolutionary in the refugee housing circuit - each Better Shelter unit only takes around four hours to assemble and is designed to last for three years. Amazing considering that conventional refugee shelters typically last only six months due to weather.
The Better Shelter units also include solar panels, which means that refugees now also have power in their temporary homes after sundown.