Vodafone's Instant Classroom will help educate refugee camp youngsters
The Vodafone Foundation announced at the Mobile World Congress the Instant Classroom, a digital 'school in a box' that can be set up in a matter of minutes, will help give children and young adults in some of the world's largest and poorly resourced refugee camps the opportunity to continue their education.
The Vodafone Foundation 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.
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.
Over the next year, the Vodafone Foundation Instant Classroom will be deployed 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.
Instant Classroom will provide 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.
