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 vital enabler of their work.
Musenyi is positioned in Burundi, a small, landlocked nation in East Africa. In 2025, hundreds of youngsters and households arrived at Musenyi searching for security and help, inserting strain on a web site that wasn’t constructed for that scale. Shelter, meals, and medical care had been among the many most pressing priorities, however none of it could possibly be coordinated successfully with restricted web connectivity.
With so many susceptible 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 expertise to Musenyi
When UNHCR’s Refugee Emergency Telecommunications Sector (RETS) group reached out to CCR in late March 2025, the ask was clear: design and deploy a community answer for Musenyi that would join a number of websites throughout troublesome terrain and in harsh outside situations, with restricted present 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 situations that might defeat commonplace networking gear.
For the primary time, CCR deployed Cisco’s industrial-grade wi-fi expertise in an lively humanitarian area operation — and the situations 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 group left for Burundi, minimizing setup time on arrival.
As soon as on the bottom, the CCR group labored carefully with UNHCR’s native IT workers to improve Musenyi’s community and develop connectivity throughout the location, linking key amenities and enabling extra environment friendly coordination throughout reduction companies.
“The very first thing we did once we bought to Musenyi was place an antenna at elevation, so it may broadcast concurrently to a number of hubs throughout the location under,” explains Matt Altman, CCR’s technical chief in programs engineering. “The purpose-to-multipoint functionality was important right here, as a result of it meant we may join the well being heart, college, the principle operations heart, and amenities with out operating a single bodily cable.”
From area operations to household calls: Placing the community to work
For humanitarian staff, dependable connectivity is vital 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 may register new arrivals extra effectively, whereas well being staff may seek the advice of with distant specialists to assist households get the medical care they want. UN companies and native companions may share real-time details about medical wants, meals distributions, and safety instances. Coordination throughout companies may occur extra simply over safe video calls, liberating up useful time and assets.
For the refugee and host group, the community opened a special sort 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 evening, 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 protected with out limiting entry for many who want it. Cisco Id Providers Engine (ISE) provides UNHCR’s IT group exact management over who can entry what: companion NGOs onboard by way of a self-service portal, and delicate programs — comparable 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 workers skilled in the course of the deployment deal with day-to-day administration on the bottom.
“When geared up with the suitable expertise, humanitarian groups can deal with supporting households and managing pressing wants,” says Kevin Murphy, CCR operations supervisor.
“In the end, our aim is to offer 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 geared up 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 impression of connectivity throughout instances of disaster
The progress at Musenyi is an illustration of what’s potential when the suitable expertise meets the suitable partnership, and what meaning for the hundreds of individuals relying on each. UNHCR’s operational experience paired with Cisco’s expertise and technical capabilities meant that the group was capable of 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 moderately than looking out by way of stacks of paper information, to the household separated throughout borders who can lastly see one another’s faces on a display screen: dependable connectivity adjustments what’s potential 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 power to keep up connections to household, to entry data, to have a voice,” he displays. “It’s a reminder that some of the significant issues we will do with Cisco expertise is to ensure — even in instances of disaster when the whole lot else is unsure — that assist, hope, and human connection are at all times inside attain.”
