UNHCR’s IT Chief On Building Field Infrastructure That Holds Up Under Extreme Operating Conditions

Enterprise CIOs are directing record technology budgets toward AI infrastructure and orchestration, building distributed systems in environments where the infrastructure is well-established and stable. In humanitarian operations, that assumption doesn't hold. Connectivity in the field must be built from scratch, maintained under extreme conditions, and defended against geopolitical, logistical, and environmental forces that no enterprise architecture framework was ever designed to account for.

Nizar Zeidan is Chief of IT Site and Emergency Support at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, where he leads a team of roughly 240 people spread across 135 countries. He has spent more than two decades at UNHCR, most recently as Global IT Emergency Coordinator, deploying connectivity and communication infrastructure in conflict zones, border regions, and remote areas where commercial services do not reach. That reality is the condition every field deployment is built around.

"Today, every single tool that we use at the United Nations, every single one of them, is cloud-based. You cannot avoid having connectivity," said Zeidan. For an organization whose footprint runs through border regions and conflict zones where no commercial provider would build, that dependency shapes every decision his team makes in the field.

Connecting UNHCR's field operations requires building from the ground up. Where no terrestrial option exists, satellite and radio systems serve as the baseline. Where terrestrial links exist, quality drops sharply beyond urban centers. And where a connection holds, the cloud-based systems that now run every UN tool have made reliable bandwidth a hard operational requirement.

• Ping of life: In the most remote deployments, connectivity starts with mobile satellite services and radio networks. "Those are data terminals that we use to send proof-of-life messages," Zeidan said, describing L-band services and vehicle-mounted satellite equipment. "If you are in a refugee camp and there's no Internet, and you need to call an ambulance or the hospital, then at least you have a radio that you can use to call the radio room, and the radio room will then call the hospital." The challenge compounds beyond signal. In locations where fuel is scarce or solar systems lack qualified maintenance, power itself becomes a constraint. "We work in places where the temperature is 50 degrees Celsius," Zeidan said. "The equipment that you brought in, no matter what it is, will eventually suffer dramatically and melt." UNHCR's work with Cisco Crisis Response in Burundi's Musenyi refugee camp illustrated those stakes directly: carrier-grade equipment, deployed in partnership, still faced conditions that surprised Cisco's own engineers.

• The last-mile mirage: Even when a terrestrial connection exists, the signal rarely holds past the capital city. Without budget for enterprise-grade network intelligence tools, field teams test by doing. "We always go for terrestrial links wherever we have access to them," Zeidan said. "You could have a company as strong as MTN deliver incredible services in a place like Yaoundé, but outside of Yaoundé it is very difficult to have any decent quality of service."

• No signal, no service: The arrival of Starlink has shifted expectations across UNHCR's field operations. "The expectation is that you're connected everywhere, and at decent speeds," Zeidan said. "Today, everybody has more than one device, which creates a lot of demand and a lot of expectations." Those expectations now collide with a harder reality: every internal UN tool runs in the cloud, meaning a failed connection doesn't just slow operations, it stops them. "You can't just have a Wi-Fi signal delivering zero bandwidth," Zeidan said. "It's going to seriously impact the way we deliver services to refugees."

Security constraints shape who UNHCR can call on when a crisis hits. In dangerous operating environments, corporate partners and external vendors cannot safely deploy their own people to the front lines, which means Zeidan builds partnerships around three levers: people, equipment, and money. The same logic extends to peer UN agencies, where shared resources reduce duplication and speed deployment.

• Red tape and routers: Zeidan’s team can’t let procurement become the bottleneck when connectivity underpins every field service. “Importation of equipment is a pain,” Zeidan said. “Financial support means flexibility for us to implement those services in those locations at the pace we know we can manage. We work with other UN humanitarian organizations instead of working in silos. Contacting WFP, for example, and saying, what do you guys have in your office? Let’s share connectivity. We share whatever we have so that there’s no need for us to go and import three dishes.” In crisis settings, that pragmatism matters: flexible funding lets UNHCR move at field speed, while shared infrastructure keeps agencies from waiting on equipment that may already be sitting in-country.

  Survival of the scrappiest: At UNHCR, shadow IT is less a governance failure than a field signal. “Shadow IT in our organization was born and still exists because our people in the field who are faced with daily challenges need to find solutions,” Zeidan said. “Because they are outside of our headquarters, we often discredit them. They don’t have a formal project proposal or a sustainable end goal. But the idea itself is relevant and valid.” The problem isn’t that field teams improvise. It’s that headquarters hasn’t fully converted that improvisation into a feedback loop.

• Headquarters in the clouds: The same dynamic plays out in how tools developed centrally reach the people who need them. In enterprise terms, it is a governance and integration problem: systems built at the center have no feedback loop to the edge operations they are meant to serve. "A lot of the tools we develop at headquarters, whether in private enterprises or even in my industry, very often don't get the feedback that they deserve from the field," Zeidan said. "We need to ensure that the work we do for the people outside of headquarters is represented and is heard."

Zeidan draws a clear line between what AI is doing at UNHCR today and what he wants it to do. At headquarters, where systems are connected and workflow automation has accelerated administrative work, the infrastructure exists to support it. The more important question, for him, is what AI can do for refugees once foundational connectivity reaches the communities hosting them.

• Backbones before bots: "In the field, for us, AI will be an extremely useful tool to better serve the refugee population," Zeidan said. "We're looking at AI as a way to better understand the needs of the refugee population, but also to allow them to tell us what is required." That vision is already taking shape through the Digital Gateway, a self-service portal allowing refugees to request documentation and check case statuses online. The foundation it depends on, though, is the same one every other UNHCR service requires. "You need that foundation, which is connectivity, to make that happen," Zeidan said. "AI doesn't resolve that foundational problem, the backbone that is connectivity." For those who assume otherwise, his assessment of enterprise AI adoption without infrastructure is blunt: "They don't understand it."

For Zeidan, the infrastructure work his team does in the field is never just about keeping systems running. "It's about giving refugees their dignity," he said. "It allows us as humanitarians to better serve them and for them to better communicate with us." Through Connectivity for Refugees and related programs recognized for advancing access to livelihoods, UNHCR works to help displaced people pursue education and tap into digital employment opportunities.