Refugee Camps children to benefit from Vodafone’s Instant Classroom lite platform

The platform is designed for teaching lessons to large class sizes in refugee camps. It includes a server with mobile educational content that teachers can access locally.

Vodafone Foundation Director Andrew Dunnet said, “Instant Classroom Lite builds on our Instant Network Schools programme, which has already provided an internet education to around 60,000 young refugees living in Dadaab Refugee camp.”

The Instant Classroom Lite kit has a projector and audio system, 3G and 4G connectivity and a laptop server preloaded with educational content. It can be powered using a solar panel, a mains socket or a 12V car socket and stays powered for four hours of use.

The equipment can be set up in just 10 minutes and can be easily transported between schools in a refugee settlement. The foundation has at the same time created an Instant Charge, a durable and portable outdoor mobile charger that can charge 66 devices simultaneously.

“The equipment was developed to support the UN High Commissioner for Refugees work on the shores of Europe where, despite good mobile coverage, there has been limited infrastructure in camps for refugees to charge their phones,” Dunnet said.

Tens of thousands of refugees will benefit from Instant Charge in a number of locations. The equipment will also be used to support the Vodafone Foundation’s disaster relief work.

Vodafone introduced the Instant Classroom first In March 2015, Instant Classroom has been specifically designed for areas where electricity and internet connectivity are unreliable or non-existent and will be deployed in partnership with UNHCR’s Innovation and Education units.

Unlike the Instant Classroom lite, The Instant Classroom is shipped in a secure and robust 52kg case which is equipped with a laptop, 25 tablets pre-loaded with educational software, a projector, a speaker and a hotspot modem with 3G connectivity. The tablets can connect to the laptop locally, enabling teachers to deliver content and applications to students without the need to access the internet.

All the components of the Vodafone Foundation Instant Classroom can be charged simultaneously from a single power source while the case is locked. After 6-8 hours of charging time, the Instant Classroom can be used for a full day in a classroom without access to electricity.

With The Instant Classroom, the Vodafone Foundation Instant Classroom looked at deploying it to 12 schools in refugee settlements in Kakuma in Kenya, in the Nyarungusu refugee settlement in Tanzania and in the Equatorial Region in the Democratic Republic of Congo and also looked at providing up to 15,000 children and young adults aged from 7 to 20 with advanced teaching aids that are currently only available in a minority of schools in developed nations.

In 2014, the Vodafone Foundation worked with UNHCR’s Education and Innovation units to develop the Instant Network Schools programme, which introduced tablet-based learning to around 18,000 pupils in the Dadaab refugee settlement in northern Kenya. Teachers at the Dadaab schools said the tablet-based lessons have been so popular that pupil attendance had increased by an average of 15 per cent.

Over the next two years, the Vodafone Foundation Instant Network Schools programme will be extended to support additional schools in refugee camps in Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo with the aim to reach more than 40,000 children and young people.