Natural disasters are, unfortunately, a fundamental part of living on Planet Earth. Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other events will continue to test the strength of the infrastructure modern society relies on, such as communication equipment like cellular networks. In this work, we propose The Rescue Base Station (RBS) a drop-in, solar power compatible, open-source GSM communication system for the scenarios where a large-scale calamity disrupts traditional modes of communication.The system operates using asynchronously connected autonomous nodes and gathers useful information from users, eventually synchronizing this data across the network using distributed network protocols. It connects people through conventional GSM services allowing calls, SMS and smart phone features when available. The networks also provides a series of services for use during a disaster, such as intelligent call routing, attribute based search on different characteristics (name, occupation and blood group), voice-mail services, SMS broadcast alerts, and emergency short-codes, through which a victim can contact available doctors, fire fighters, police and rescue workers.

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Illiteracy is one of the biggest development challenges, especially in the developing regions. There are 785M adult illiterates in the world; one in every five people has little or no basic reading skills. Illiteracy poses the following challenges: It limits the ability to understand essential information, it increases unemployment, poverty and it has a negative impact on health.In this study, we present VillageApps -a framework to educate underprivileged communities in their mother tongue. The paper details the platform, its functionality, and its initial evaluation on a group of 30 school-aged children. Our framework consists of a web and a mobile application; the web application provides an interface to upload content and record its page by page audio translation; the mobile application provides an interface to view each page and simultaneously listen to its audio translation.