Tech for Change
Hosted by the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, the "Tech for Change" blog shares insight and experiences from the frontlines of innovative mobile technology use in support of United Nations and other humanitarian work worldwide.
Tuesday 16 September 2008, 10:50 PM
From Kosovo to Haiti: TSF's Emergency Communications for Disaster Relief
By Monique Lanne-Petit, director and co-founder of Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF)
After a large-scale disaster, there is urgent need for food, water, shelter, and medical help. Yet none of this is possible without quick and reliable communications.
Conflicts and natural disasters also often lead to massive civilian displacement, and separated families with no way of contacting one another.
By providing rapidly-deployable telecommunications centres, Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF), an organisation I helped to create just over 10 years ago, is helping to save lives and support victims and their families in the aftermath of major disasters.
We came up with the idea for Télécoms Sans Frontières from a simple observation made after many years’ experience with humanitarian charities, and listening to those in need. As volunteers working with missions responding to the crises in the Balkans and in Kurdistan during the first Gulf War, TSF co-founder Jean-François Cazenave and I realised that, in addition to medical and food aid, there was a critical need for reliable emergency telecommunications services.
During those missions, we were often approached by refugees with scraps of paper asking that we contact family members on their behalf. To address the need for communications services, Jean-François and I, along with a small team of others involved in TSF from the very beginning, bought our first satellite phone and TSF was born.
We conducted our first “humanitarian calling operation” in Tropoje (Albania, Kosovo border) in 1998. Since that time, TSF has offered a 3-minute call to families affected by major disasters in over 60 deployments. It is impossible to imagine the power of these phone calls.
In one memorable example a woman in camp on the Chadian border with Darfur managed to contact her brother in Khartoum to find out that her son was still alive. She had waited three months to find out whether he had survived when they fled their village and three minutes of a call put an end to those months of misery and anxiety.
Through our work, we soon found that the international humanitarian relief workers that deploy to emergencies also had a critical need for reliable telecommunications services in the first days after an emergency. With support from the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, we expanded our operations to begin providing direct support for the broader international relief community including UN, government, and NGO humanitarian workers.
[Read more in Monique's post "Making Connections to Support Emergency Communications"]
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For more information about TSF, visit www.tsfi.org. To learn more about the UN Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, visit www.unfoundation.org/vodafone.
After a large-scale disaster, there is urgent need for food, water, shelter, and medical help. Yet none of this is possible without quick and reliable communications.
Conflicts and natural disasters also often lead to massive civilian displacement, and separated families with no way of contacting one another.
By providing rapidly-deployable telecommunications centres, Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF), an organisation I helped to create just over 10 years ago, is helping to save lives and support victims and their families in the aftermath of major disasters.
We came up with the idea for Télécoms Sans Frontières from a simple observation made after many years’ experience with humanitarian charities, and listening to those in need. As volunteers working with missions responding to the crises in the Balkans and in Kurdistan during the first Gulf War, TSF co-founder Jean-François Cazenave and I realised that, in addition to medical and food aid, there was a critical need for reliable emergency telecommunications services.
During those missions, we were often approached by refugees with scraps of paper asking that we contact family members on their behalf. To address the need for communications services, Jean-François and I, along with a small team of others involved in TSF from the very beginning, bought our first satellite phone and TSF was born.
We conducted our first “humanitarian calling operation” in Tropoje (Albania, Kosovo border) in 1998. Since that time, TSF has offered a 3-minute call to families affected by major disasters in over 60 deployments. It is impossible to imagine the power of these phone calls.
In one memorable example a woman in camp on the Chadian border with Darfur managed to contact her brother in Khartoum to find out that her son was still alive. She had waited three months to find out whether he had survived when they fled their village and three minutes of a call put an end to those months of misery and anxiety.
Through our work, we soon found that the international humanitarian relief workers that deploy to emergencies also had a critical need for reliable telecommunications services in the first days after an emergency. With support from the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, we expanded our operations to begin providing direct support for the broader international relief community including UN, government, and NGO humanitarian workers.
[Read more in Monique's post "Making Connections to Support Emergency Communications"]
--
For more information about TSF, visit www.tsfi.org. To learn more about the UN Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, visit www.unfoundation.org/vodafone.
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