Disaster Tech Lab is sending a team to Ukraine in early April for our first deployment of 2024.
Read below for information on what the mission goals are and how you can support it.

How can you support:

We need volunteers willing to travel with our team to Reni. Drivers, IT/networking engineers, electricians are required. Interested? Then please complete our volunteer application form.

Donate! We need funds to purchase supplies and to fund the costs of this mission. Please give via our donation page!

Background:
We first visited Reni during our spring deployment in 2023.
A local contact introduced us to Mrs. Michelle Potgieter. She is the head of the “Light for the World” Christian Church. She also owns a large building in the center of Reni. The building houses a coffee shop on the ground floor but the upper 3 floors are used for all kinds of community outreach functions. They run daycare services for children, provide all kinds of support services for IDP’s, host schools and training courses and much more. This is also the building where we ran pop-up medical clinics.

Need:
Michelle and her church group are heavily involved in providing the disadvantaged demographic of the city and surrounding areas as well as hosting and helping the IDP’s in the area.

The demand on their services has grown significantly since the start of the war in 2022. One of the many challenges is reliable communications. Regular rocket attacks as well as repeated Russian cyber attacks have disabled telecoms services for long periods.
In addition to telecom outages there are also frequent power outages. These are due both by the rocket attacks on the city and surrounding areas as well as attacks on power plants further away which service the area.

The above needs can be addressed by installing a dedicated satellite internet service which is independent of the nationwide telecoms infrastructure. Additionally the building above the Light Cafe can be fitted out with a robust wifi network. A reliable and redundant power supply can be provided by installing solar panels on the roof which power one or multiple large battery packs. 

Tasks:

• Installation of Starlink terminal on roof of building located at 160 June 28th Street, Reni.
• Install indoor wifi access points on all floors and configure multiple SSID’s.
• Install solar panels on roof of building and connect to charge controller plus batteries.
• Configure battery packs as failover power supply for Starlink terminal and wifi access points.
• Provide maintenance and support training for Starlink and wifi equipment.
• Deliver 20 battery powered lanterns to function as emergency indoor lighting.
• Provide pre configured laptops (20) and provide basic training for usage and maintenance.
• Deliver 100 children (school-) backpacks prefilled with suitable contents to be distributed to local children.
• Deliver 2 flatscreen TV’s and 10 children sized bean bags to the daycare center.