Digital Humanitarianism and Migrant Precarity: Martynka and the Newcomer App

Digital humanitarian platforms have become increasingly visible in migrant support ecosystems, offering guidance and referrals where access to services is fragmented and uneven. This article examines how digital humanitarianism reconfigures responsibilisation and gendered precarity in migration governance through a comparative, document-based analysis of Martynka in Poland and the Newcomer App in Canada. Drawing on the feminist political economy and digital humanitarianism scholarship, it conceptualises these tools as digital interfaces that render integration legible as an informational problem and improve navigability within governance systems marked by conditional inclusion, uneven service coordination and donor-dependent civil society funding. Across the cases, integration-support labour becomes feminised most visibly in Martynka’s women-centred support ecosystem, while the Canadian case highlights how gendered labour-market inequalities and caregiving constraints shape the conditions in which broadly targeted self-navigation tools are expected to work. The article also identifies ethical and privacy challenges associated with reliance on third-party digital infrastructures. Overall, digital humanitarianism emerges as both a pragmatic response to governance gaps and a mechanism through which responsibilisation is reproduced in an interface form.