Dependable web entry will not be the very first thing that involves thoughts when you consider humanitarian responses. However, for the UN Refugee Company (UNHCR) and its companions responding to pressing wants at Musenyi refugee camp, connectivity is a crucial enabler of their work.
Musenyi is situated in Burundi, a small, landlocked nation in East Africa. In 2025, hundreds of kids and households arrived at Musenyi looking for security and help, inserting stress on a website that wasn’t constructed for that scale. Shelter, meals, and medical care had been among the many most pressing priorities, however none of it might be coordinated successfully with restricted web connectivity.
With so many weak individuals relying on a coordinated, efficient response, UNHCR turned to its trusted partnership with Cisco Disaster Response (CCR) to work collectively on an answer.
A primary-of-its-kind deployment: Bringing industrial-grade Cisco know-how to Musenyi
When UNHCR’s Refugee Emergency Telecommunications Sector (RETS) workforce reached out to CCR in late March 2025, the ask was clear: design and deploy a community answer for Musenyi that might join a number of websites throughout tough terrain and in harsh out of doors circumstances, with restricted current infrastructure to construct on. There was no underground fiber cabling, no dependable mobile sign, and no viable solution to run bodily cables throughout the terrain. The answer needed to work in circumstances that will defeat normal networking gear.
For the primary time, CCR deployed Cisco’s industrial-grade wi-fi know-how in an lively humanitarian area operation — and the circumstances at Musenyi had been precisely what this gear was constructed for. Ruggedized to resist warmth, mud, and rain, it created high-speed connections between websites as much as 1,000 toes aside with out a single cable within the floor. A lot of it had been pre-configured earlier than the workforce left for Burundi, minimizing setup time on arrival.
As soon as on the bottom, the CCR workforce labored carefully with UNHCR’s native IT employees to improve Musenyi’s community and broaden connectivity throughout the location, linking key amenities and enabling extra environment friendly coordination throughout reduction companies.
“The very first thing we did after we obtained to Musenyi was place an antenna at elevation, so it might broadcast concurrently to a number of hubs throughout the location beneath,” explains Matt Altman, CCR’s technical chief in techniques engineering. “The purpose-to-multipoint functionality was important right here, as a result of it meant we might join the well being heart, college, the principle operations heart, and amenities with out working a single bodily cable.”
From area operations to household calls: Placing the community to work
For humanitarian staff, dependable connectivity is crucial to their day-to-day work. As soon as the upgraded wi-fi community was in place, Musenyi’s operations started to shift. UNHCR groups might register new arrivals extra effectively, whereas well being staff might seek the advice of with distant specialists to assist households get the medical care they want. UN companies and native companions might share real-time details about medical wants, meals distributions, and safety circumstances. Coordination throughout companies might occur extra simply over safe video calls, releasing up priceless time and sources.
For the refugee and host group, the community opened a distinct form of door. Musenyi’s two web connections — a microwave hyperlink and a low earth orbit satellite tv for pc — are allotted based mostly on time of day. Throughout enterprise hours, humanitarian staff have devoted bandwidth for each day operations whereas refugees use the opposite connection; at night time, automated scripts reconfigure the community, rendering the total capability of each connections out there to the group to allow them to entry data and join with family members.
Underpinning all of it’s a safety structure designed to maintain delicate data secure with out limiting entry for individuals who want it. Cisco Identification Providers Engine (ISE) provides UNHCR’s IT workforce exact management over who can entry what: companion NGOs onboard via a self-service portal, and delicate techniques — equivalent to refugee registration knowledge, safety case recordsdata, and medical information — stay protected all through. Cisco SecureConnect layers DNS filtering, firewall safety, and net safety throughout all customers, defending each humanitarian operations and the refugee group from on-line threats. And with Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed dashboard, CCR engineers can monitor community well being and resolve points remotely, whereas native UNHCR IT employees skilled throughout the deployment deal with day-to-day administration on the bottom.
“When outfitted with the suitable know-how, humanitarian groups can give attention to supporting households and managing pressing wants,” says Kevin Murphy, CCR operations supervisor.
“Finally, our aim is to supply the location managers with the instruments and coaching they should keep environment friendly, linked, and safe. It’s rewarding to see our options assist others ship support extra successfully and join communities that had been beforehand out of attain.” — Kevin Murphy, CCR operations supervisor
The funding in infrastructure and hands-on coaching put Musenyi in a stronger place to deal with no matter got here subsequent. When extra households arrived within the following months, UNHCR and companions had been higher outfitted to reply. To maintain tempo with the location’s evolving wants, we additionally shipped Cisco-donated gear from UNHCR’s emergency stockpile in Geneva to Burundi whereas persevering with to obtain further supplies and coordinate a follow-up deployment.
Past the bandwidth: The human affect of connectivity throughout occasions of disaster
The progress at Musenyi is an indication of what’s attainable when the suitable know-how meets the suitable partnership, and what meaning for the hundreds of individuals relying on each. UNHCR’s operational experience paired with Cisco’s know-how and technical capabilities meant that the workforce was in a position to co‑design an answer that was match for the context and the individuals it’s meant to serve.
From the humanitarian employee who can pull up a case file in moments relatively than looking via stacks of paper information, to the household separated throughout borders who can lastly see one another’s faces on a display: dependable connectivity adjustments what’s attainable in a disaster.
For Altman, this work isn’t merely about offering web service. “We’re giving humanitarian staff the instruments to do their jobs extra successfully whereas giving people who find themselves enduring unimaginable hardship the flexibility to take care of connections to household, to entry data, to have a voice,” he displays. “It’s a reminder that one of the significant issues we will do with Cisco know-how is to verify — even in occasions of disaster when the whole lot else is unsure — that assist, hope, and human connection are all the time inside attain.”