Jangala - Wi-Fi for the marginalised

Internet access is a lifeline, and with Covid-19 and climate change placing unprecedented strain on individuals and systems worldwide, being online has never been more important.

Many of the most vulnerable people, and organisations delivering public services to them, remain unconnected - exacerbating global and national digital divides. Jangala creates vital internet access technologies in refugee camps, healthcare clinics, schools, and other development projects worldwide.

We do this by building and deploying affordable, performant, and rapidly deployable Wi-Fi through custom-built systems that are effortless to use. To date, we have connected over 40,000 vulnerable people worldwide in partnership with 45 aid organisations and charities including UNHCR, the IOM, and the UK's NHS.

Our technology has real scope for scalable impact, and is applicable to small NGOs and organisations who may deploy one system, all the way to large national and multilateral organisations that may deploy hundreds or even thousands.

Internet access is the critical infrastructure of the digital age. However, many of the most vulnerable individuals, and organisations performing the most socially impactful services don’t have access.  

For individuals, the internet is a way to communicate and access resources, information, and services ranging across healthcare, education, democratic participation, and legal redress. But only half of the world's population is online, ranging from over 90% in developed nations, 50% in developing nations and just over 20% of people in LDCs, according to ITU figures. 

Those offline are often concentrated amongst the most marginal groups, such as refugees and vulnerable adults, the elderly, and low-income households. In the UK, for example, 1.9 million households are without internet access. Covid-19 is exacerbating this divide, and vulnerable groups have been the hardest hit, increasingly disadvantaged by the rapid shift to online service delivery. 

Organisations, including those providing essential social services, are relying increasingly on connectivity to improve their efficiency and plug into powerful global knowledge networks and supply chains. However, schools, clinics and disaster relief projects face substantial difficulties getting online: both from operating in remote geographical regions and because of the substantial expertise and costs required to build effective networks. 

Jangala’s solution consists of two internet delivery devices: Big Box and Get Box. Developed in response to the urgent and widespread need for an affordable, simple way for the world's vulnerable people and the organisations supporting them to get online, we designed these systems to provide reliable and rapidly deployable internet for projects addressing some of the world’s biggest development challenges. To date, we have connected over 40,000 people worldwide across a range of challenging scenarios, from refugee camps across Europe to remote schools, healthcare clinics and community hubs in Asia and Africa.

At their core, both devices rely on utilising GSM and other sources of internet backhaul, ethernet switching, compute cores capable of running telemetry, traffic shaping and device management, and Wi-Fi to provide connectivity to end users. They are controlled through the cloud, in which Jangala is building infrastructure that allows organisations to easily monitor, control and gather usage stats that are privacy-respecting by design. 

By providing internet access, Jangala’s work also provides a platform for the deployment of other socially valuable projects that rely on digital technologies, expanding our ability to effectively reach and help the most marginalised populations and address a number of global development challenges.  

Refugees are a particular priority for Jangala. Currently over 65 million people are displaced globally. With only 1 in 5 refugee camps connected to the internet, and only by a 2G signal, connectivity is rarely available or affordable for residents. The difficulties for organisations looking to connect camps is also substantial given the traditional complexity of building large Wi-Fi networks. 

Conceived at the height of the refugee crisis, our technology was created specifically to enable internet access for displaced people and provide a connection that would cater to their needs and help them to thrive, and Jangala’s roots in humanitarian response continue to shape our approach. 

While we initially developed our technology to provide a solution to the lack of connectivity for displaced people and the organisations supporting them in refugee camps, the sheer demand for our systems, coupled with the wide-ranging nature of socially valuable projects we have delivered to date have guided us to widen the scope of our work to also include under-resourced clinics, schools, grassroots charities and larger NGOs and bodies worldwide. As a result, our focus has expanded to include other underserved communities, specifically those who are slipping through the cracks of the digital divide: whether that’s people experiencing homelessness, families struggling financially, people living in rural areas with limited access to services, or people affected by disaster. Our partnership decision-making framework ensures that we only partner with organisations that have a detailed understanding of their users’ needs, and are best-placed to meet them.

Our people-centered model equips our partner organisations on the ground with the tools and capabilities needed to connect their own operations and provide internet access to the communities and groups who they serve. This approach means that we are able to facilitate the mobilisation of communities to build forward on their own terms.

Moreover, to ensure that our solution is addressing the needs it sets out to, we maintain close working relationships with our partner organisations as well as periodically collecting feedback from users. This is in addition to monitoring the data usage remotely through our systems. 

As the critical infrastructure underpinning so many crucial services, the Wi-Fi we provide to our partners has been a lifeline during moments of global crisis: from the European refugee crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

At the core of Jangala's mission is the question posed by MIT Solve’s digital inclusion challenge: How can everyone have access to the digital economy? Our devices represent our technology-based solution to ensuring that everyone has access to high-quality internet, with a particular focus on the world’s most marginalised people.

Since 2015, we’ve been providing low-income, remote, and refugee communities worldwide with access to safe, affordable internet. We work both with grassroots refugee charities such as MRS and Care4Calais (France), Amala (Kenya), and PPR (UK), and larger bodies including the UNHCR (in Uganda) and the NHS (UK), among many others. 

Jangala is currently in the pilot phase of development, with a view to be ready for growth by 2022. Since Big Box was conceived in 2016, and Get Box in early 2020, we have been working with humanitarian organisations and grassroots groups to iterate the product design based on live feedback from the field.  

We already have many pilots underway with key future customers, including Camara Education, Unicef, UNHCR, War Child and the IOM, who are piloting systems on a small-scale, regional basis with a view to scaling roll out across programmes internationally. We are currently deploying systems in small batches internationally across EMEA, LA, and AP, and are carrying out development that will allow us to deploy in the 100s in early 2022. 

The innovativeness of our systems is a function of their simplicity and flexibility. Many organisations at the front line of service provision don’t possess the expertise needed to deploy internet access, and many of the most vulnerable individuals also have the least digital skills. Big Box and Get Box not only help overcome these barriers, but they provide a platform for future innovation, from edge compute to renewable energy harvesting. 

There is currently no generally available, affordable solution that meets the connectivity needs of aid organisations working in remote or emergency settings, connects the people they support, or for healthcare clinics and schools in remote and under-resourced regions. Jangala’s solution is innovative in that it uniquely addresses these multiple sustainable development challenges by effectively advancing a key underpinning infrastructure: internet connectivity. Our products are also innovative for their widespread use cases, whether they have been used for mobile inoculation teams with Marie Stopes to connect to the head office while in remote regions, for a small healthcare clinic in Himalayan Nepal to access expert advice, or emergency response teams such as Team Rubicon staying connected post-disaster.

Crucially, our technology provides reliable internet access in the toughest conditions without expertise, making it accessible across contexts and empowering our users to harness the connectivity as they see fit. Built with sustainability and scalability in mind, Jangala technology also harnesses satellite connections using traffic shaping and content control to maximise utility and minimise cost.

Currently, we are directly connecting over 6,000 people through 26 different projects, from school children and their teachers in Nairobi, Kenya to patients at a healthcare clinic in Tanzania. To date, we have directly connected 40,000 people. By the end of 2022, we will directly connect over 200,000 people for an estimated 4 million hours of browsing time. By 2026, we aim to directly connect over 8 million people for over 150 million hours of browsing time.

Beyond these figures, the secondary impact of connecting organisations and individuals brings associated co-benefits to beneficiaries’ wider communities through improved service delivery, education and healthcare outcomes, and improved economic opportunities. This includes for example expedited Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS testing in the Embo Healthcare Clinic in South Africa, as well as improved awareness of symptoms and distancing measures. Leonard Gcabashe, who runs the Embo clinic, said: ‘I believe [Big Box] will also limit the spread of Covid-19 because there will be no need for our driver to collect laboratory results in person. We can’t wait to start online systems of exchange of communications with our mother clinic and [the] lab to improve our service.’

By providing reliable internet to our partners at major aid agencies like UNHCR, War Child, and the IOM, as well as grassroots charities such as Care4Calais and MRS, this means that staff and volunteers can access resources and expert advice, carry out digitalisation activities and streamline systems and processes, saving time and money.

Our main impact measurement is through measuring the number of individual devices connected to our systems for over one minute - or the time it takes for a connection to be meaningful, to download or upload information, receive and send measurements. We do this currently through a Unifi-based telemetry system and will soon be moving to our bespoke telemetry system that provides Jangala and partners with automated reports on system performance, devices connected, data transferred, and signal strength. By coupling these statistics with partner-led site surveys, baseline and follow up surveys, we can understand and report on the number of individuals connected, including those on shared devices, the size of the wider community impacted, and against which SDGs. Currently, the projects we support are making progress against 11 of the 17 SDGs but the versatility and usability of our technology allows us to aim to make progress against all of them in the coming years.

5 full time staff work on our solution team (managing technology, operations, product design and manufacture, partnerships and fundraising) with the support of 2 contractors.  

Jangala was founded by the volunteer team that covered the ‘Calais Jungle’ refugee camp with Wi-Fi in 2015, at the height of the European refugee crisis. 

Rich Thanki, MD and Technology Lead, has a history of evaluating the social impact and economic potential of wireless technologies, with widely-cited research published in 2009 (https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7020039036.pdf), 2012 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/02/spectrum-economic-significance-of-license-exempt-spectrum-report_thanki.pdf), and 2013 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/spectrum-case-for-permissive-rule-based-dynamic-spectrum-access_thanki.pdf). From 2013-2017, Rich provided technical and impact-oriented expertise to projects deploying connectivity using TV White Space technology in Sub-Saharan Africa. Rich designed the Calais Jungle Wi-Fi network and Jangala’s technology. Jangala’s work has a personal resonance for Rich, whose parents came to the UK as refugees from Uganda in the 1970s.

Nils O’Hara is Head of Operations. He started working in the humanitarian sector in 2015, inspired by his family’s decision to foster 4 refugees. Nils founded the Worldwide Tribe and Calaid, to deliver refugee aid.

Samson Rinaldi is Head of Physical Product Design. He has extensive knowledge of emergency response, designing elements of the emergency shelter-building programme in the Calais Jungle and deploying Wi-Fi with Disaster Tech Lab following the Amatrice earthquake in 2016.

Lamis Serroukh is Head of Fundraising. Her background is in social innovation, education, and communications. She’s headed fundraising efforts at London-based start-ups, undertaken a social entrepreneurship fellowship, and worked as a charity worker, journalist and teacher.

Anna Hickman is Head of Partnerships. With a background at the Overseas Development Institute and in journalism, Anna has an in-depth knowledge of the issues pertaining to development.

We’ve made concerted efforts to ensure that both our board and management team reflect the diversity of the people we serve and we are all committed to this as an ongoing and lifelong area of focus for our organisation. 

50% of our board and operational leadership team are women and our team is headed by a Managing Director from a refugee background. In addition, both our newest trustee, and Head of Fundraising are women from migrant backgrounds. 

In early 2021, our leadership team sought advice from D&I experts to feed into our new diversity, equity and inclusion policy. This policy will formalise our commitment to creating an environment that attracts, motivates, and supports the best people from all backgrounds. So far, it includes: flexible, remote-first working; a total emphasis on experience, talent and motivation, rather than academic qualifications or CV specifics; a monthly lunch and learn; the upcoming establishment of employee representation on the board of Jangala; a shadow employee-ownership scheme open to all employees. 

Formalising this policy also involves a review of our hiring processes. As it stands, we are actively encouraging applications from groups traditionally underrepresented in technology, and post jobs in networks used by these groups. Part of this also includes reaching out to organisations who specialise in diversity in tech to broaden our reach. We are also committed to running our job adverts through a gender bias decoder to ensure the language we use doesn’t dissuade women and non-binary people from applying. 

Jangala’s current focus is to remove barriers to scale so that we can move quickly to address the critical global need for socially valuable connectivity. We are developing our deployment capability, from partnerships, technical support and production, to business resilience. Consolidating and enhancing our internal processes and systems over the next 24 months will be critical to our scaling mission.  

Support from Solve in the form of mentorship as we refine our business model and create the legal structure between our trading subsidiary and charity will pave the way for Jangala to go from deploying to and supporting hundreds of projects in the field, to thousands. We also welcome the broad network and partnership opportunities that joining the MIT Solve community will bring, as Jangala’s deployment model is to provide the underpinning connectivity infrastructure to other charities, enterprises and aid agencies working to make progress against the SDGs. 

In the short-term (in 2021), expanding our pilots with new partners will provide invaluable feedback with which to iterate our technology and processes. From 2022 onwards, we are seeking to establish partnerships with major deployment partners whose activities and projects require connectivity, so that we can support each other in delivering this solution at scale. Joining the MIT Solve community and accessing the global network would come at a critical point in Jangala’s journey to become the primary technology provider to the humanitarian and development sectors.

As we prepare to set up a trading subsidiary to develop our technology and offer connectivity products and services to humanitarian and development organisations and beyond from 2022, we are actively developing our business model, financial processes, and adapting our legal structure. Expertise would be invaluable in several key areas: legal advice to support this organisational development, advice around IP and licensing, operational legal support to help us scale, and general legal business development support as we take the next steps in creating our novel charitable/commercial technology start-up model. 

Solve’s support for organisations working towards achieving the SDGs is directly compatible with Jangala’s mission, to provide the critical infrastructure needed to effectively carry out interventions and solutions in the hardest-to-reach, and often left behind, regions and communities. As such, we would welcome general introductions to all Solver teams to explore new partnerships where Jangala can support new and innovative solutions and digital technologies to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Whether working with past Solve winners such as ISeeChange to support their collection and reporting of micro-data about climate change in the field, or to help Code Nation reach children in unconnected areas so they can start careers in tech, or ShockTalk to connect indiginous people with online mental health support, Jangala’s technology and partnership potential is not limited by sector or solution type, only by the recognition that underlying infrastructure is critical to reaching those left behind from progress against the SDGs.

Of Solve Members, we welcome introductions to international partners who can facilitate scaling our solution to areas of critical need, whose own projects would benefit from reliable internet connectivity, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Nature Conservancy. 

Jangala was founded in response to the European refugee crisis to connect refugees to critical information services, healthcare, education and to their families - and this remains our priority. 20% of refugee camps have internet access and connectivity is often unavailable and unaffordable for people living there. The difficulties for organisations looking to connect camps is also substantial given the complexity of building large networks. According to the World Bank, refugees remain in exile between 10-15 years, so ensuring that they don’t miss out on education - or other services - is essential.

We’ve already provided connectivity to thousands of refugees in Europe’s informal refugee camps through partners MRS and Care4Calais, In Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, we are providing the underlying connectivity for partner Amala to deliver innovative online education courses. In Uganda, we are supporting UNHCR to connect protection desks in Nakivale Refugee Camp, so refugees have a secure way to report on rights infringements. In the UK, we’re connecting asylum seeking activities through human rights charity PRR. And, through the NHS, we’re connecting refugees who have survived trauma to online mental health counselling.

As climate change and global instability force more people from their homes (the IOM estimates that by 2050 this figure could reach 1 billion), ensuring refugees can access education and information remains Jangala’s priority. We would use the Andan Prize to develop our proposed Lock Box, a 2G-capable low power/high performance server that supports data gathering and information sharing in extremely remote locations.

Jangala’s technology is designed to enable universal and affordable internet access, providing the infrastructure to connect organisations supporting the world’s most marginalised. Our technology presents an innovative, feasible, and scalable solution to the digital divide.

The key barriers to universal internet access are affordability and accessibility. We address the affordability barrier by ensuring our technology is free for end-users and very low cost for our partners. We achieve this by controlling data usage through traffic shaping, our intuitive design which eliminates expensive installation and maintenance costs, and by using a cost-effective blend of our own PCBs and off-the-shelf parts to create the hardware.

Our solution addresses the accessibility barrier by drawing upon any internet input in even the most remote settings. Where organisations might previously have struggled to connect their remote or mobile operations, our systems are able to provide them with strong, fast, and reliable internet.

As well as developing the infrastructure to connect people, we are also interested in advancing digital literacy. We are working with digital skills training specialists AbilityNet and the NHS to provide a package of mental health and digital skills support to isolated asylum seekers in London. Participants in this trial are receiving online counselling, on-call digital skills support from Jangala-trained volunteers, and a Get Box to connect these activities. 

Support through the HP Prize would allow us to accelerate work to introduce a simple UI to our devices, improving accessibility for those with additional needs, and improving performance and troubleshooting in remote locations.

Digital transformation provides new avenues for economic empowerment, with the internet offering opportunities in education, healthcare access, and employment. According to Plan International, digital literacy has become almost as important as traditional literacy; over 90% of jobs worldwide already have a digital component and most will soon require sophisticated digital skills. However, women are far less likely to have access to technology, or possess the digital skills to use it. According to UN Women, the global internet gender gap is 17% and growing.  

Only by equipping girls and women with underlying technology and opening up opportunities around digital skills will the world achieve SDG5: the SDG on which all other SDGs depend. Over half of Jangala’s projects focus on providing connectivity for women: with our partner Skateistan in Afghanistan, we have connected skate schools where women and girls can socialise, build confidence, and take skateboarding lessons. Now equipped with connectivity, Skateistan is rolling out digital literacy lessons too. Meanwhile, education partner Amala runs an international high school-style diploma for young refugees to continue education while in limbo, but need connectivity for their courses. With Jangala’s technology, they’re running programmes to girls in three schools in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, and in informal refugee camps in Greece. In the UK, Jangala has provided household-level connectivity for girls through a London-based school, and to a women’s refuge. With the recognition of this prize, we would seek to expand a partnership with Vodafone to explore opportunities around data and device provision.

Jangala is a UK-based charity providing free internet access to vulnerable people in challenging contexts worldwide. The charity was founded by the volunteer team that created a Wi-Fi network to cover the Calais Jungle refugee camp in 2015. This network connected 5,000 refugees a week, as well as organisations providing crucial services including education, health, and legal advice. As news of the network spread, we were overwhelmed with requests worldwide for connectivity. 

When the pandemic hit, many vulnerable households were left isolated from important public services. Building on our roots in humanitarian response and strong track record providing the lifeline of connectivity worldwide, in early 2020 we expanded our focus to include local communities across the UK and ever since, have been providing free internet to: 

• Women and children living in a women’s refuge in Essex

• Schoolgirls and their families from low-income households in London

• Trauma patients living in poverty in London

• Refugee activists challenging restrictions on their right to work in Northern Ireland

• A small community in the Orkney Isles after a subsea cable went down over Christmas 

• People living in emergency accommodation in Brighton

• People experiencing homelessness in Sussex

We would use The GSR Prize money to use our innovative technology to expand our education projects (in particular STEM), alleviate poverty, and contribute to a more sustainable world, starting from our local communities in and around the UK.