He has the voice. He just can't stay on the call.

This morning I was on a planning call with Richard Muma, who advocates for people with disabilities inside Kakuma - a refugee settlement of more than 300,000. He has the plan, the standing, the community behind him. What he doesn't have is enough bandwidth to stay on the call. We watched him break into fragments and drop out, again, while a room of westerners with good intentions and good wifi kept the meeting going without him.

That's not a bad connection. That's the gate. $3,200 clears it.

You've felt a version of it - the call drops right as you're about to say the thing that matters, and for a second you're talking into a void. Stop treating that as an inconvenience. It's the only thing standing between Richard and the work.

Here's what almost nobody has caught up to: the knowledge is already free. MIT and Harvard put their courses online for nothing, and tools like NotebookLM turn them into your own videos, slide decks, quizzes, and flashcards - in your own language, on your own terms. The whole world just changed. The last gate standing is the hardware.

$3,200 gives DICB - Disability Inclusive Community Building - and three other disability-led nonprofits the coordination capacity to actually show up: to hold the room, pull in county and federal officials and health workers, and put disability needs at the center instead of the footnote. Kenya is moving to turn Kakuma into a municipality. That conversion gets designed with or without disabled people in the room. DICB is positioned to be the catalyst that puts them in it - upstream, where the decisions cascade down.

This isn't charity, and Richard isn't a story we're telling on your behalf. $3,200 hands him the microphone and gets out of the way. He already has the voice.

Where your gift goes (approximate allocation, sourced regionally where we can):

$1,100 - Field-ready laptop: refurbished semi-rugged, upgraded to 16GB memory and 512GB storage, built to keep working for years.

$560 - Solar power and battery: charges the kit and about ten phones, and keeps working when the grid does not.

$500 - A bright 2,000-lumen projector: so the whole room sees one screen together, even with daylight in the room.

$450 - A year online: a 4G hotspot and twelve months of data.

$200 - The Danny sidekick: a Raspberry Pi running a local, offline-capable AI.

$180 - The room mic: a 360-degree conference mic that captures every voice, transcribes it, and names who said what.

$210 - Case, cables, setup and delivery: a lockable case, spare storage, and RIA configuring it before it ships.

Total: $3,200. Real prices shift, and RIA publishes the actual receipts as the kit is bought.

Your gift routes to RIA, a 501(c)(3). We buy the hub as RIA-owned equipment, source it near Kakuma where we can, configure it, and get it to Richard ready to run. Follow the build at ria.earth/kakuma/

Shannon Dobbs, Regenerative Impact Alliance

Kakuma - Richard's Disability Coordination Hub

Equip a disability leader inside Kakuma Refugee Camp to host the room.

Team Members