In its nine years of life, Télécoms Sans Frontières (Telecoms Without Borders) has chalked up nearly 60 missions to disaster zones, including parts of Indonesia wrecked by the 2004 tsunami. But with a dozen full-time staffers it remains minuscule, and reliant on volunteers, from graduates to pensioners. Last October the NGO got a five-year grant of $2m from the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, the mobile-telephony firm’s charity arm. The money was a down-payment for doing, a bit more formally, the kind of job that TSF already specialised in: acting as an advance guard for big, UN-managed operations. This article looks at TSF and its work – the rapid commissioning of telecoms networks in disaster zones
Type: Article
Region: Global
Category: Governance/political, Other
Organisation/Author: The Economist