Using Wireless to Save Lives

In early 2005, Hamadou, frail and ill following days of starvation, walked for almost a day with his equally frail mother from his remote village in Niger - a landlocked country in western Africa - to the nearest town, Dakoro, to find food. Niger, the world's poorest country, faced its worst food crisis that year following an unusually dry season and locust invasion. The crisis affected 3 million Nigeriens and resulted in an unprecedented exodus from remote villages to faraway towns and cities in search of food. Hamadou and his mother were one of the few lucky ones to find both work and food in Dakoro. They returned home when international relief workers brought food to their village.

If Niger, a country known for perennial dry seasons and droughts, is hit by a food crisis again, Hamadou and others in his village won't have to desert their homes again. Thanks to Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) - or Telecom Without Borders - a France-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides emergency telecommunications services in disaster-hit areas around the world - Hamadou's village now has a permanent wireless telecom link with Dakoro, one of Niger's nerve centers. The link will allow villagers to get supplies long before a similar crisis strikes again.

Hamadou's village isn't the only one. TSF installed a dozen permanent telecom links in the Dakoro region that cater to more than 720,000 Nigeriens. And according to TSF officials, 27 more permanent wireless telecom sites will be installed "soon."

"That's the big change in Dakoro as well as in TSF," said Oisin Walton, information and communications coordinator for TSF. "The region now has a permanent telecom connection that links it to the capital. And with the installation of telecom centers in Niger, TSF has transformed itself from being just a provider of emergency communication to also being a provider of information and communications technology (ICT) for prevention of emergencies and disasters."

Indeed TSF is a unique example of how an NGO is using ICT to respond to humanitarian crisis, proving telecommunication's role is just as significant as bringing food, water, shelter, protection and medical help in any disaster.

Founded in 1998 by Jean-Francois Cazenave and Monique Lanne-Petit, TSF's genesis was the simple observation, made after many years of experience, that in addition to medical and food aid, reliable emergency telecommunications services are critical.

In 2006, TSF became a partner of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and UNICEF, which made it the "First Responder" of the UN's Emergency Telecommunications Cluster.

TSF is also a working group member of the United Nations emergency telecoms body, WGET; a partner of the Humanitarian Aid Department of the European Commission (ECHO) and a member of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies.

Over the last nine years, TSF has chalked up nearly 60 missions to disaster zones - usually reaching a destination within 24 hours. These efforts helped hundreds of NGOs and thousands of families overcome many types of crises - everything from tsunamis, floods and earthquakes to man-made disasters, like the Iraq war.

"While providing telecom services in such crises, we realized that again the role of ICT cannot be just kept limited to providing of emergency communication services," Walton said. "We realized that telecommunication, in fact, could also play a key role in the prevention of emergencies like a food crisis or an epidemic."

The Niger installation is a concrete example of how technology can be used to prevent calamities as well.

A Century Behind
One key contributing factor to the 2005 food crisis in Niger was that there was neither telecommunications infrastructure, nor a postal system. As a result, the government's food crisis prevention system proved completely ineffective for mitigating the crisis's effects. For instance, Walton said,