Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado Kataya of JSA. Here at Telecom Exchange Los Angeles. With me, I'm joined by Mr. Rudolph Gordon-Seymour. He is Head of International Funding for TSF, Telecom Without Borders. For our viewers who may not be familiar with TSF, tell us a little bit more. Okay, well, TSF was formed 21 years ago and it was founded by two people, Jean-François-Castanoff and Monique-Lene Petit, who were carrying out more traditional humanitarian work during the 1990s Balkans crisis. And what became very apparent during that crisis was they were having children adults come up to them with crumpled bits of paper in their shoe with a number on and they would be passing this to Monique and Jean-François and really asking them if they could, when they got home, if they could contact their family, their loved ones, their mother, their fathers and really let them know that they were okay and let them know they were alive. So that's how it started and it became apparent at that point that communications was no longer a luxury. It was an necessity. So the first mission that TSF went on was in 1999 in Turkey, Northwestern Turkey and that was the Ismit earthquake, which lasted 37 seconds but it killed 17,000 people and it displaced over a quarter of a million people. And in the last 21 years, Telecoms on Frontier have carried out 140 deployments across 70 countries and supported over and reconnected over 20 million people and also supported nearly a thousand other NGOs on the ground. Unbelievable, unbelievable. You guys are certainly known as the reliable first feet on the street, first feet on the ground, critical communications team in areas devastated by man-made or natural disasters. Such important, as you said, communications during times of need, telling a mother that the child is safe can't be further underscored as the important work that you guys do. So thank you on behalf of our entire community. Thank you for what you guys do. It's really amazing. Yeah, and I mean, I'd like to point out that the real heroes of TSF are the teams that go out on the missions, have to go out on the ground in what can be incredibly challenging conditions, especially during natural disasters, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, floods. And they have to deploy within 24 hours anywhere in the world, which logistically getting teams out there with the right equipment, provide the right support on the ground, as you can imagine, is incredibly challenging. Yeah, just heroes. There's no other word. Now, beyond your support in times of disaster striking, you also have long format projects that you're working on. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Yeah, I mean, kind of touching on the core mission. And our core mission is to provide communications for life and reconnect the unconnected. From the emergency response missions, we also roll out long-term programs. One of those is what we call capacity building. And what we've seen in various parts of the world is reoccurring disasters. So, for example, the Philippines, TSF have deployed in the Philippines nine times in that area. So what we try and do is actually provide the capacity post disaster and actually run workshops for local responders in those countries to build up their knowledge of not only fixing telecoms infrastructure, but also installing telecoms infrastructure. So they can be even quicker and better at responding on the ground. So that's one area that we focus on. Other areas we focus on is education programs. So we've been on the Syria Turkish border for a number of years now providing education and what we call M learning. So we will provide the ITT equipment on the ground and also a curriculum for those refugee children of which there are many. And we are talking about children who are a lost generation of education and childhood. So there's different levels of children that we have to provide education services to and all of those are at different levels. So that's the really important part of the work we do. We also do bridging the digital divide programs which we will basically provide ICT infrastructure. We do this in Sub-Sahara and Africa. We do it in Madagascar and we will actually provide the equipment and also the internet connectivity. And we will then employ generally local staff on the ground in those countries to run the program and then we will visit it regularly to make sure it's all running properly. Much needed access to areas just devastated. And are these like one-year pilot programs? What's the what's the what's the timeline for these long-term programs? Well, I mean if we if you look at the Syria problem which is you know war that's gone on for almost 10 years. So we've been on the ground there for a number of years, four or five years providing education. And as long as we have the right funding we can continue to provide those long-term programs. We're also looking at other programs. So one of the one of the pilots that we want to run next year 2020 is what we call a tech-claps program. And that's really kind of another level. I mean we're going to run it in parallel to the education programs but this is kind of focusing on technology. Again it's it's it's targeted to children between the age of five and ten. And we will provide programming workshops in a kind of a in a fun way. And so we will provide a laptop with a what we call an M robot or an M bot. And what they program and the programming blocks will then dictate what the robot does. So it's a really kind of fun environment to learn in. And the will also will also provide workshops on basic things like fabrication and electricity. So the basic principles of electricity, the basic principles of repairing objects. So this is something that's really kind of close to our heart. And it's and it's something that we want to run a pilot next year and also roll out to other parts of the world. So needed so needed that education so that you can grow up to be a stronger generation that that gives more to their communities as well. It's it's amazing work. Tell us in the spirit of the holiday season how can we help? Well firstly if people could take a look at our website which is very informative. That's Tss.org. On there you will find lots of information about historical missions, lots of real time updates on current missions and the longer term programs. More importantly there's two very clear kind of red buttons on there. One is donate and one is support. So we take kind of micro donations. We have an organization set up in the US as well called Friends of Tss and that's for our US market donations. And then we also have a partner program. So telecoms on Frontier is backed and financed over 80% from corporate tail co technology companies. And we have some great long-standing partners. And without them we literally could not do the work we do. So I kind of urge people to have a look on the site see what we do and either micro donate or look to become iphone. Absolutely Tss.org and donate or support. Rudolph thank you so much for your time and sharing this amazing work and story of how you guys you know started the little kids with the phone numbers to your founders and the the emotion that you guys drive you every day to continue to be on notice 24-7 to answer the call. Really amazing. We appreciate you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.