By Sofie Roux

“I’ve had the honor of writing articles for the Refugee Empowerment Project since 2019. Every month since tenth grade, I’ve checked the latest reports from the Guardian, the Atlantic, and the UNHCR to read about the courage and strength of refugee families seeking asylum around the world. It’s always been a great privilege to bring these stories to the attention of REP readers, but I was disappointed to be so far away from the action, with little ability to do anything concrete to help the phenomenal people I was reading and writing about. At around the same time my friend began REP, I launched my architecture based social enterprise, BloomBoxes, with the goal of building solar powered computer labs out of repurposed shipping containers for highschool girls in Malawi. Over the past three years, the team I’ve built has deployed three of these labs in urban and rural settings, moved all production to the South African Development Community, employed local technicians, and supported thousands of students with STEAM makerspaces. Until this summer, I never got to see a link between REP research and BloomBoxes.

On June 29th 2023, a next generation BloomBox with a newly patented roof system was successfully deployed in Dzaleka refugee camp in Central Malawi, the largest refugee camp in the country.

For some background: in April of 2021, the government of Malawi announced an order for refugees from across the country to relocate its largest refugee camp for national security reasons (The Guardian). In many cases, these refugees had settled in rural communities and cities, married, started families, and opened businesses. In the wake of this decision, The World Congress of Librarians and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) approached BloomBox with an idea to install a solar-powered computer lab to support STEAM education curricula in the refugee camp.”