Photo of dead ‘boy on the beach’ Aylan Kurdi boosted donations to Syrian refugees 100-fold

An iconic photo of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up dead on a Turkish beach had a greater impact on fundraising efforts for Syrian refugees than hundreds of thousands of deaths, a study has shown.

The photo of Kurdi appeared in media across the world in the days after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2015. His family were Syrian refugees of Kurdish origin, attempting to flee the war to Europe.

“People who had been unmoved by the relentlessly rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after having seen Aylan’s photograph,” said the report, from science research institute ‘Decision Research’.

The study used fundraising data from the Swedish Red Cross, which showed a significant increase in donations after news of Kurdi’s death, as well as data from Google Trends, which showed a major spike in searches for the terms “Syria” and “refugees”.

Both the number of donors and the total raised increased after the photo circulated.

In the week after Kurdi’s death, the study said the average number of daily donations to a Syrian refugee fund run by the Swedish Red Cross rose 100-fold. Before the photo circulated, the charity received fewer than 1,000 donations in a day; afterwards, it rose to almost 14,000.