Case Study: Télécoms Sans Frontières achieves reconnection for 25K+ Venezuelan refugees (153K calls) with Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking

How Télécoms Sans Frontières Helped Venezuelan Refugees Regain Their Lives via Technology

Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) is a Pau, France–based NGO that specializes in emergency-response communications. During the Venezuelan migration into Brazil, many refugees could not contact family because international calling costs were prohibitive, Venezuelan operators had lost roaming capability, and local communications infrastructure was strained or broken.

TSF built a hybrid communications solution using analog handsets, local terrestrial links, efficient codecs and Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking (VoIP) to reduce latency, raise call quality and support many simultaneous free calls. Over a 20‑month program across 19 locations in three cities, TSF enabled about 153,000 calls and assisted more than 25,000 refugees, achieving far greater scale and lower cost than prior satellite-based approaches.

Télécoms Sans Frontières

Florent Bervas

Head of Mission