Accountable documentation of our community-led work: frontier technology infrastructure across the Turkana–Karamoja–South Omo corridor, and peer-led digital safety education for refugee women and girls in border communities.
Download the full PDFs or read the structured summaries below.
A decentralized, offline-first mesh network linking grassroots organisations across the porous borders of Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia — trained, governed and maintained by 32 community tech stewards, 70% of them young women from pastoralist backgrounds.
A peer-to-peer pilot placing digital safety directly in the hands of 45 refugee women and girls — addressing SIM-swap scams, image-based abuse and misinformation, and producing six new community facilitators.
Mayhem Threads Technology & Innovation Collective · Implementation Period 2024–2025
Regions: East Africa, Horn of Africa & Great Lakes
Headline figures from the 18-month implementation period.
Between 2024 and 2026, Mayhem Threads implemented the Cross-Border Liaison Tech Network, a pioneering initiative designed to strengthen digital connectivity, information sharing, and collaborative problem-solving across porous borders in the East African region. The project established a decentralized, secure communication infrastructure linking grassroots organisations, community-based networks, and civil society actors operating in cross-border corridors of Turkana (Kenya), Karamoja (Uganda), and South Omo (Ethiopia).
The network trained 32 community liaisons — predominantly young women and youth from pastoralist, nomadic, and stateless communities — in the deployment and management of low-bandwidth, offline-first digital tools. These tools enabled real-time coordination on drought response, livestock disease tracking, conflict mediation, and human rights monitoring, all while preserving data sovereignty and community control.
Unlike conventional cross-border projects that rely on centralized, cloud-dependent platforms operating from capital cities, the Liaison Tech Network was designed for intermittent electricity, minimal internet access, multilingual communication, and high mobility. All data routing, storage, and decision-making remained under local governance, with community-elected tech stewards managing network nodes.
Six commitments that framed the network’s design and evaluation.
Among grassroots organisations and community networks operating in the Turkana–Karamoja–South Omo corridor.
Functioning without reliable internet or electricity, using mesh networking, peer-to-peer sync, and solar-powered local servers.
With priority given to young women and youth from pastoralist and stateless backgrounds, to install, maintain, and govern network nodes.
Ensuring all information shared across the network remains under local control, with explicit consent governing any external access.
Whether community-governed tech networks can outperform top-down systems in speed, trust, and relevance for cross-border crisis response.
Cross-border liaison tech models that can be adapted by other frontier communities across the African continent.
Participatory action research and infrastructure deployment — every aspect co-designed with community members, not imposed upon them.
Built on three core principles: offline-first operation, horizontal peer-to-peer communication, and community node governance. A distributed mesh topology let each hub communicate directly with neighbouring hubs, passing messages across the corridor like a digital relay.
Twelve grassroots organisations were selected across the three countries based on established community trust, existing cross-border relationships, and demonstrated capacity for collective decision-making. Priority went to women-led organisations, youth peace committees, and livestock marketing associations already operating transnationally.
A two-week residential orientation covered digital security basics, network governance, conflict-sensitive communication, and node operation. All partners signed a Community Data Sovereignty Compact committing to local control, consent-based sharing, and rejection of extractive data practices.
Thirty-two community liaisons (ages 19–34, 70% women) completed intensive training delivered in Kiswahili, Turkana, and Ngakarimojong — combining practical technical skills with political education on digital sovereignty, surveillance, and the colonial history of information extraction in border regions.
Deployment ran in three phases over 18 months. Phase One established proof-of-concept nodes in four strategically located settlements. Phase Two expanded to twelve nodes, testing interoperability across national boundaries and languages. Phase Three integrated community radio linkages and trained secondary users — elders, livestock traders, women’s group leaders — in basic network access.
Every deployment was accompanied by community assemblies where node locations, access schedules, and data-sharing rules were collectively agreed. No node was installed without visible community consent, and each displayed a public charter of governance principles in local languages.
Six constraints that shaped the project and informed its evolution.
National security agencies in all three countries viewed cross-border communication infrastructure with suspicion, and stewards faced questioning by local authorities. Persistent transparency, community vouching, and clear non-political governance charters were essential to maintaining operational space.
Temperatures above 40°C, dust storms, and rough transport damaged equipment faster than projected. Solar panels needed weekly cleaning and antennae wind reinforcement. Local repair capacity had to be built from scratch — no commercial tech support existed within 200km of most nodes.
The corridor spans more than six languages and numerous dialects, and machine translation was unavailable offline. Relay between nodes required bilingual stewards, creating bottlenecks during urgent communications. Visual and voice-based interfaces outperformed text-only systems.
In some settlements, male elders and youth initially challenged women’s authority as network stewards. Consistent community assembly endorsement, visible technical competence, and the backing of women’s organisations were necessary to establish their legitimacy.
The 18-month timeline was constrained by short-term grant cycles, while community infrastructure requires long-term maintenance commitments that project-based funding cannot guarantee. Sustainability depends on shifting from donor dependency to community resource mobilization and social enterprise.
Government and humanitarian actors struggled to interface with a network running on open-source protocols outside their proprietary IT systems. Building bridges without compromising community data sovereignty required careful negotiation and technical adaptation.
Cross-border technology is not primarily a technical challenge — it is a political and relational one. The hardware and software were the easiest parts. Building trust across borders, navigating state suspicion, ensuring women’s leadership, and sustaining community governance required far more time, skill, and patience than any installation manual could anticipate. Technology that works across borders must first be governed by relationships that transcend them.
The network fundamentally shaped our organizational identity and strategic direction, establishing the collective as a credible actor in frontier technology infrastructure — moving beyond training and advocacy into the design and deployment of community-governed systems.
The network established a foundation Mayhem Threads intends to deepen and expand over the coming years. Future priorities include:
“Technology should open borders for communities, not close them for corporations. The frontier is not empty space waiting for external connection, but a place where communities can weave their own digital threads across the lines that divide them.”
— Cross-Border Liaison Tech Network Report, Section 8
Digital Literacy & Safety for Refugee Women and Girls in Border Communities
Implemented by Mayhem Threads · With the support of Share-Net International
Outcomes reflecting both immediate confidence gains and the early signs of a self-sustaining model.
With the support of Share-Net International, Mayhem Threads carried out a community-led digital safety pilot across three border communities, placing digital literacy and online safety directly in the hands of the women and girls it was designed to protect. Rather than a top-down training programme, the pilot relied on peer-to-peer facilitation, equipping participants to recognise and respond to digital threats within their own social networks.
The pilot reached 45 refugee women and girls through peer-led sessions addressing three pressing digital risks: SIM-swap scams, image-based abuse, and misinformation amid a rising tide of fake news. Participants reported a 70% increase in confidence to deal with digital challenges, and six women have since gone on to lead their own sessions.
Border communities present a distinct set of digital safety challenges. Refugee women and girls living in these areas often face limited access to formal digital literacy resources, precarious connectivity, and heightened exposure to exploitation, scams, and misinformation — risks frequently compounded by displacement, language barriers, and unfamiliarity with local digital ecosystems.
Testing whether a community-led, peer-to-peer model builds more durable digital safety skills than conventional, externally delivered training.
Rather than relying solely on external facilitators, the program trained and supported women from within the participating communities to lead sessions for their peers — building trust, ensuring cultural and linguistic relevance, and creating a foundation for the knowledge to keep spreading after the pilot’s formal end.
The pilot engaged 45 refugee women and girls across three border communities through a series of structured peer-to-peer sessions. Communities were selected for their high concentration of refugee women and girls and their limited prior access to digital safety programming.
Three digital risks identified as most pressing for participants.
How fraudsters hijack phone numbers to gain access to accounts, and the concrete steps participants could take to protect their SIM cards and identities.
Recognising, preventing, and responding to the non-consensual sharing or exploitation of personal images.
Building the skills to critically evaluate content and navigate a media environment saturated with fake news.
Following the pilot, participants reported a 70% increase in their confidence in dealing with digital challenges — a strong indicator that the peer-led, hands-on format translated into real, felt gains in their ability to identify and respond to threats like SIM-swap scams, image-based abuse, and misinformation.
The pilot’s most significant outcome is its multiplier effect: six women from the participating communities have gone on to lead their own digital safety sessions. This organic transition from participant to facilitator suggests the model is not only transferring knowledge but cultivating local leadership and ownership.
Digital safety education can be both effective and self-propagating when designed around community leadership rather than one-off external delivery. For refugee women and girls often underserved by mainstream initiatives, this offers a scalable pathway to closing the digital literacy gap while strengthening social cohesion.
Mayhem Threads gratefully acknowledges the support of Share-Net International, whose partnership made this pilot possible. Sincere thanks also go to the 45 participants and, in particular, the six emerging peer leaders whose commitment and courage are already extending the impact of this work.
These summaries are drawn from full field reports intended for internal reflection, partner learning, and accountable documentation of community-led work. They do not claim to represent the full diversity of the pastoralist, nomadic, stateless or refugee communities involved, nor do they replace ongoing community governance of the programs themselves.