Offline Internet Project

Muy-Cheng Peich graduated from the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris, France). She worked as a researcher in cognitive psychology, studying memory, attention and social cognition. Passionate about mechanisms underlying learning and creativity, as well as education issues, she is thoroughly convinced that education and access to information can and should a play a role in the reduction of social inequalities.

Keen on working towards the use of innovation for social impact, she joined Libraries Without Borders in 2014, after working with the organization on the adaptation of Khan Academy for French-speaking countries. She then created the Department of Education, Contents and Training at Libraries Without Borders. Together with her team, they promote empowerment and agency through innovative education methodologies and tools, carefully curated contents and the experimentation of activities that encourage creativity, analytical and critical thinking, and learning by doing. Muy Cheng is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Half of the world’s population doesn’t have access to the Internet. While access to information is vital in humanitarian situations, the Internet is lacking where people need it the most, in the poorest and most exposed regions.

Technology is a great opportunity for information dissemination, learning, training and support to amplify the work of humanitarian actors. But its potential is hampered by a triple challenge: 

• Lack of connectivity

• Content, often unavailable in the relevant languages, unadapted to the local context, not verified or not available in open access

• Ownership: providing content is not enough if users lack digital literacy and don’t know how to search for the content they need. 

To tackle this challenge, we design offline internet solutions to provide access to knowledge in areas with no or low Internet access. Information and education empower people giving them the agency to make enlightened choices for a better future.

A growing proportion of crisis-affected populations are now equipped with smartphones. Almost ⅔ of refugees are active mobile phone users and about 53% of them own a smartphone - 78% in Jordan. For populations on the move, their smartphone is often their most valuable asset. Digital technology represents a real opportunity for refugees and displaced populations.  But its use comes up against a harsh reality: 50% the world's population has no access to the Internet. The countries most affected by humanitarian crises are often located in the least connected regions, whether it is the result of political decisions in non-democratic countries where the Internet is monitored, censored or because connectivity is too expensive, unstable or absent. In natural disasters or migration contexts, it is an even scarcer resource. Refugees are 50% less likely to be connected than the local population.

Beyond connectivity, the problem includes the inadequacy of content with the local needs, language and culture, and the training of local communities to use the full potential of these technologies. Many white-elephant projects bring in hardware solutions filled with Western-produced resources, ignoring that tech should be a tool to serve actors in the field and not an end in itself.

The Offline Internet project enables access to rich-media without any Internet connection. It includes:

• Frugal and robust technologies for offline access, adapted to the most difficult conditions, 

• A catalog of more than 35.000 localised and easy-to-update content in 25 languages 

• Communities of practice and in-person training of facilitators to build our partners’ capacity and facilitate the transfer of skills 

More specifically, we have created the Ideas Cube, a nano-server that creates a wifi-hotspot and enables users to browse content and apps directly on their smartphone as if they were on the Internet, but without any connectivity. We also developed the Kajou SD cards for individual use. Uploaded with content, they transform any smartphone, into an offline library or campus.

Our solutions are designed to fit : 

• The needs of populations by providing solutions for information security, education, professional training, risk preparedness. 

• The needs of humanitarian actors by enabling them to efficiently disseminate knowledge, increase the outreach of their activities and to multiply the impact of their programmes through digital inputs;

• The reality of the contexts by bringing a frugal, contextualised, sustainable and agile response to the problems related to the lack of Internet connection and technologies access. 

We aim to serve the 79.5 millions refugees and displaced communities. For them, digital communication remains a daily challenge. Access to information and knowledge can strongly impact life choices and their ability to make informed decisions. Information requirements range from conditions in their place of origin, eligibility to access assistance, job opportunities, enrolment possibilities in local schools, etc. Cut-off from the normal support system of families and communities, identifying, accessing and assessing relevant information places more stress on individuals on the move. Migrants and refugees need access to a variety of vital information during transit and upon arrival. However systemic dissemination of vital information during transit that will mitigate risks and ensure safe migration is a challenge. 

BSF has worked alongside refugees and 400 field partners for more than 6 years to systematically adapt our solutions to their needs. End users are involved from the beginning in the design of our solutions. If the hardware is standardised, the content is always tailored to fit the local needs. At the core of our work, we choose to partner with local communities and partners who are anchored in the local ecosystem, opting to strengthen their capacity, and not replace them.

We believe that knowledge empowers people and gives them the agency to make enlightened choices for a better future. To this end, we build bridges between the information society and those who are excluded from it. The Offline Internet project aims at providing refugees, displaced communities and migrants with the opportunities offered by tech innovation. We rely on existing field partners to disseminate our solution (international NGOs, humanitarian agencies, community-based organisations), with the objective to support their work and amplify their impact, elevating the positive outcomes of their actions by putting technology at the service of the most vulnerable populations.

We first realized the importance of access to information in Haiti, in 2010. BSF was working with universities to strengthen the impact of local libraries, when the earthquake happened. Because we knew that we were not a humanitarian organisation, we flew back to Paris, thinking that others should address the primary needs of displaced populations (healthcare, shelter, food). But our Haitian partners quickly called us back, saying that access to information and knowledge was even more essential in a time of crisis than before. In the refugee camps, rumors were circulating making it difficult for people to decipher the true from the false. We partnered with UNICEF to deploy libraries under tents: simple community-spaces with volunteer librarians who provided access to information, but also cultural resources and education, creating a sense of normalcy in a context that is anything but normal.

That is how we created the Ideas Box: a pop-up media center that can be deployed in the most challenging context. But we quickly realized that access to the Internet was lacking in most humanitarian contexts, because the infrastructure does not exist, connectivity is too expensive or forbidden. Since 2014, we have been working on developing Offline Internet solutions.

Access to information and knowledge is a fundamental human right. And it is a prerequisite for the exercise of one’s rights: civil, social, economic, political and cultural. It enables everyone to make enlightened choices and to make their voices heard.

To us, access to knowledge is a means to fight all forms of populism and extremism. By promoting the development of critical mindsets and encouraging the confrontation of opinions, libraries contribute to the understanding of human differences as a source of common good. Knowledge is a dialectic and participates in creating a plural society.

On a personal level, being the youngest daughter in a family who came to France as refugees, after suffering through the Cambodian genocide, I strongly value a system that enabled me to be the first in my family of 5 brothers - one of whom died during the Pol Pot regime - to benefit from a strong education. My parents always instilled in me the power of knowledge in the face of adversity, giving me a sense of agency that enabled me to make my own choices and try to give to others what the context in which I was born offered me.

Our Offline Internet solution already serves more than 200.000 users in 30 countries, providing access to vital information to unconnected populations. We partnered with more than 400 NGOs, agencies, governments and community-based organisations to test and implement it in the field, including IOM, Save the Children, NRC or DRC.

We have targeted priority sectors for which the benefits of the solution are the most significant and impact other sectors as well. The Offline Internet covers the needs of vulnerable populations across the entire Humanitarian - Development - Peace nexus, providing an adaptive, comprehensive and sustainable solution.   

Tomorrow, with your support, we hope to give access to knowledge and quality information to millions of people not connected to the Internet. 

But our aim is not to become a fabricant of thousands of servers to equip NGO, states or agencies. Our end goal is to transfer to key humanitarian actors the ability to create their own offline internet solution and implement it on the field. This is why our offline internet solution is completely open source and documented. We aim to foster a community of developers and practitioners who will continue to improve the solution. We will rely on our experiences across a wide range of contexts, and  the relationships that we have built with field partners who have a deep understanding of the needs of refugees and involve the local communities in the design of the solutions.

Together we will scale faster and in a much more sustainable way.

The Covid-19 crisis has been a tremendous challenge for our organisations, our field partners and first and foremost the communities that we serve. The rapidity of the dissemination of the virus - especially in overcrowded places, such as the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar (Bangladesh) -, the lack of preparedness and visibility have created particularly harsh conditions in the humanitarian contexts. 

Most of our partners have had to suspend their activities, leaving the communities that we serve in a desperate situation at a time when access to information could have played a great role. Because we knew how important that was, we quickly mobilize our teams to repurpose the Ideas Box spaces and Ideas Cube servers that were set up in humanitarian contexts, to distribute reliable information about the Covid-19, ways to protect oneself and one’s family, and about fake news that were beginning to circulate and to hamper the health professionals’ work. We curated content on Covid-19 in French, English, but also Rohingya, Bengali, Kirundi,  and other languages, and updated our servers to create information hubs in Cox’s bazar and in Burundi. Trained by our teams, facilitators held health sensitization workshops for refugees and host communities.

BSF occupies a unique position in the ecosystem: we do not replace existing actors, but we rather aim to amplify the impact of our partners through our expertise. Because local actors are the best placed actors to identify the needs of local communities and respond to them, we tailor our tools, content and accompaniment to them to help them reach more people, reach them more efficiently or reach new groups. 

We have been working on the Offline Internet project for 6 years. And we are not the only ones striving to develop such solutions. However as it is often the case in the non-profit sector, funding opportunities are scarce and all our efforts were diluted by a lack of cooperation. In 2018, with the IFLA and the ASU, we gathered the 20 organizations that we knew were created offline solutions and led a discussion on the possibility of uniting our forces to create a common standard for Offline Internet. Aligning the interests of such a large and diverse group required strong leadership skills. We managed to come out of this summit with the creation of the Offline Internet Consortium that includes the main organisations that are working on offline access. 

Our work stands halfway between a humanitarian NGO that intervenes in the most difficult situations and a social enterprise that helps local and national organisations, institutions and governments diffuse knowledge where it is most needed. The diversity of our actions is our strength. We strive to give everyone the capacity to be free and autonomous, and make decisions that help realize their aspirations. 

We aim to ensure that innovation is put at the service of social impact, and in particular focusing on the most vulnerable and isolated individuals. BSF leverages a unique set of expertise and innovation backgrounds combining:

• IT development skills with a strong experience in creating offline internet solutions to provide access to rich-media content to unconnected populations

• Pedagogical engineering with more than 10 years of experience in curating content, creating open access content and designing both in-person and digital training modules to build capacity locally

• Designing efficient and impactful strategies for information dissemination to the most vulnerable populations, in challenging situations

BSF occupies a unique position in the ecosystem: we do not replace existing actors, but we rather aim to amplify their impact through our expertise. 

We invest in access to knowledge because we believe that plural societies are best equipped to face global challenges through innovation and collective intelligence. Our work has been recognized by institutions and prestigious organisations such as the MIT Solve, the Google Impact Challenge, the French presidential initiative La France s’engage, the Clinton Foundation and the Library of Congress. 

We are currently serving more than 200.000 individuals with the Offline Internet project. 

Libraries Without Borders has served more than 6 millions users in 13 years.

In one year, we hope to serve more than 500.000 people. Through partnerships, we hope to scale the Offline Internet solution within 5 years and serve more than 20 million people.