Response time is measured in days, not quarters
A drought, a flood or a displacement does not wait for a procurement cycle. Two things decide whether an operation can function in the first fortnight: whether the team on the ground can communicate, and whether anyone can see what is actually happening across the affected area.
What has to be true before anything else works
The team can report
A VSAT terminal on the ground gives voice, data and reporting from a location with no cell coverage and no fibre. It is installed by people who are already in the country rather than flown in with the equipment.
Somebody can see the area
Satellite imagery covers the ground nobody can safely reach yet: flood extent, crop failure, road condition, the size of a settlement that was not there last month.
The data has somewhere to live
Beneficiary and assessment data can be held in country, which for many programmes is a condition of the funding rather than a preference.
Four things, from one operator in country
The advantage is not any single one of these. It is that the same company installs the terminal, brings down the imagery and holds the data — so the coordination overhead lands on us rather than on a programme team that has other problems.
Rapid field connectivity
VSAT for field offices, camps and assessment teams, operated from our own teleport in Mogadishu rather than a hub abroad.
- Typical use
- A sub-office or camp that has to be operational this month
Drought & flood monitoring
Where the water reached, which cropland failed, which roads are passable — measured over a series rather than argued from anecdote.
- Typical use
- Targeting a response, and evidencing it afterwards
In-country hosting
Beneficiary and assessment data held inside Somalia, in a facility with real power and cooling topology rather than an office cupboard.
- Typical use
- Programmes with a data residency condition attached
Country office connectivity
Managed circuits between the country office, sub-offices and partner organisations, on protected paths where the fibre reaches.
- Typical use
- The permanent footprint behind the emergency one
Tell us where, and how quickly
Give us the locations, the timeline and what the programme has to be able to report. We will come back with what can be deployed, what can be observed from orbit instead, and what each option realistically takes.