New mobile network boosts aid effort

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) and Swedish telecommunications firm Ericsson will provide 200 cellular telephones in Kabul later this week to help facilitate aid work, crucial for the war-ravaged Afghan capital.

WFP spokesman Khaled Mansour told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday that the mobile phone service would enable users to make and receive international telephone calls.

"This is a breakthrough for the aid community," Mansour said. "Communications is crucial for their work, to be able to contact each other inside Kabul, or to connect internationally," he added.

The project, announced in Kabul on Wednesday, would supply 200 cellular telephones to the UN and other relief agencies working in Kabul, by the end of this week, though the system has the ability to provide up to 5,000 connections.

Ericsson, a leading international telecommunications company, has provided equipment worth US$ 5 million, free for the six-month project. It has to remove this equipment and go commercial, if it wants to still operate in Kabul after the project period is over, aid workers told IRIN.

"We believe that there should be a faster and more effective response to disasters," a statement on Ericsson Response Programs website said. "We have provided mobile communication to refugee camps in Kosovo crisis, reinstalling telecom equipment and provided tents to earthquake victims in Turkey, as well as phones to flood victims in Vietnam," the site, describing Ericsson's emergency response activities, said.

Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for the Special Representative of the UN's Secretary-General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, told a news conference in Kabul that the system was already up and running.

"This is unique for the relief world, and a big step for telecom development," he added.

Kabul, with an approximate population of 2.5 million people, mostly relies on satellite telephone link with the outside world. Years of fighting and economic hardship has ruined most of its infrastructure. There is a small telecommunications set up in Kabul but it is not linked with the outside world and is not reliable even internally.

There was no immediate comment from the company or WFP whether similar system will be installed in other major cities of Afghanistan to help speed up aid work. Communication infrastructure in the rest of Afghanistan is shambolic.