This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Back in 1988, when he was working for Unicef in the Maldives, Sharad Sapra was struggling with a maths problem: how to divide 25 qualified teachers between 325 islands. "One of the things we worked on was video-recording lectures and training people on the islands how to play VHS tapes," says Sapra, now 57 and the director of Unicef's global innovation centre in Nairobi. Over the next couple of decades, Sapra hacked tools and systems to deliver education in impossible situations, broadcasting radio lessons from Uganda into southern Sudan during the Darfur conflict, and eventually creating the School in a Box kit. "How do you set up schools in an emergency situation? There's a refugees kit; there needs to be a schools kit.
You opened it, and there were teaching and learning aids in there, and you could start a small school."
Sapra took the kit to Burma, South Sudan and Afghanistan, but kept bumping up against one obstacle: "The logistics of buying textbooks and moving them is just so expensive," he says. "Children in poor areas can't afford them. We saw children writing down textbooks, just so they had something to read. Now all of this technology -- tablets and laptops -- is available, how do you bring it together?"
The new Digital School in a Box is Sapra's answer. Dubbed the Mobi-Case, its latest iteration packs a projector, speaker, laptop and document scanner into a ruggedised package. Chinese company HongHe is producing the boxes, which cost $200 (£120), but the design is open source: "Any manufacturer who wants to get into this game can."
The first units are in field trials in Uganda, each supporting a school of 100 to 200 children -- shown here is Jessica Tribbe, of Unicef's Uganda Innovation Lab, demonstrating a Mobi-Case to teachers at the Seeta CU school. Sapra also sees uses beyond education, for instance, as a public-information service: "When you have an outbreak of cholera, take it out to the street, connect a mic, and it's a public-address system." He's also used the boxes for telemedicine and, following the recent conflict in the DRC, to reunite 92 out of 96 child refugees with their families. "Usually that would take months, but digitally, the information was available right away."