Medair
Medair is humanitarian organization inspired by Christian faith to save lives and relieve human suffering in the world’s most difficult-to-reach and devastated places. Since 1989, Medair has been helping people in crisis – regardless of race, creed or nationality. Medair’s mission is to enable the world’s most vulnerable and difficult-to-reach people to live in dignity, free from human suffering, and with hope for a better future. Medair regularly responds to humanitarian crises occurring in remote and challenging environments, where infrastructure supporting terrestrial communications are limited or non-existent.
Medair's involvement in Smart Connect
Within the SmartConnect
consortium, Medair acts as a humanitarian testing partner, bringing the
operational perspective of emergency humanitarian organisations into the
development and validation of the SmartConnect solution. Medair contributes by
translating humanitarian user needs into concrete requirements and by assessing
how satellite communications, middleware services, and Earth Observation (EO)
data can support emergency decision‑making in real humanitarian crisis
contexts.
Through its participation, Medair will test SmartConnect in realistic operational environments. These tests focus on critical humanitarian scenarios such as humanitarian operations data transmission, team security and emergency communications, electronic health records transfer, and disaster impact mapping. Testing will be carried out within selected Medair country programmes of Madagascar and South Sudan, in contexts where reliable terrestrial connectivity cannot be assumed, to simulate real‑world disruptions and emergency conditions.
To support this testing, Medair applies SmartConnect tools directly within ongoing or simulated humanitarian operations, temporarily disabling existing connectivity to rely solely on the SmartConnect satellite solution. This approach allows Medair to evaluate system reliability, usability, data transfer performance, and operational feasibility from a frontline humanitarian perspective, while collecting feedback.
Based on these results, Medair will consolidate lessons learned and produce recommendations for humanitarian emergency applications of SmartConnect, helping ensure the solution is accessible, relevant, and effective for organisations responding to crises worldwide.