Telecoms Sans Frontieres Working with U.N. Foundation on Emergency Response
The UN Foundation and Vodafone are donating to Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF), and in return the aid organization will help U.N. emergency responders by meeting their communications needs in disaster areas. Their 5-year, $2 million grant will let TSF respond to more emergencies in more countries, TSF Pres. Jean-Francois Cazenave told reporters Thurs.
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The grant boosts TSF’s $950,000 annual budget, which supports a staff of 50, mostly volunteers, that sets up emergency communications centers using laptops, routers and satellite gear. The UN Foundation and TSF began collaborating this year. TSF has helped U.N. aid workers after flooding in Surinam, an earthquake in Indonesia and fighting in Lebanon and the Congo, officials said Thurs.
“The way that emergencies are run has really changed; and the place of telecom has grown into this central role,” Paul Margie, a senior dir. at the U.N. Foundation, said: “Communications is an essential element of successful emergency response… What we saw, and what the U.N. emergency responders began to see, was that the system that they built up originally to do this emergency calling… filled a gap within the official emergency response system.”
The TSF equipment works in “the toughest places in the world” using gear small enough to be carried onto a commercial flight and able to be installed quickly, Margie said. Each center provides 10 data lines, fax capacity and a 100-meter diameter Wi-Fi coverage. “We are very mobile,” Oisin Walton, a TSF emergency responder, said: “We have small crews in comparison to other [aid groups]. You don’t need that many people to actually run a center.”
Inmarsat, AT&T and Cable & Wireless also give to the group, which seeks contributions from other telecoms. “If the telecom industry with the U.N. Foundation could help us it would be fantastic because we can do more work in the field,” Cazenave said.