MTN Y'ello Care Digital Inclusion Hubs (Mangateen & Gorom)

South Sudan hosts hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and refugees, many in settlements with little or no reliable electricity or internet access, cutting them off from e-learning, e-health services and mobile financial tools.

In 2025, MTN South Sudan installed 4G-powered, solar-enabled internet hubs in the Mangateen IDP settlement and the Gorom refugee settlement near Juba, part of its annual "21 Days of Y'ello Care" campaign under the theme "Connecting at the Roots." The hubs provide free or subsidised access to humanitarian digital services, including e-learning, e-health and child-protection platforms, and act as charging stations where grid power is unreliable.

Alongside the hubs, MTN distributed subsidised smartphones through a blended model of donated devices and mobile-money-enabled instalment financing (protected by smart device-locking technology), and trained youth and women as community digital facilitators delivering mobile-money, online-safety and digital-literacy training. Refugee youth were also enrolled in the MTN Skills Academy.

MTN reports that the two hubs directly reached over 2,800 refugees and displaced people, with 200 households gaining smartphone access within the first month, while the wider four-community campaign (which also covered Terekeka and Sherikat) reported reaching more than 40,000 residents. These figures come from MTN's own case study and are echoed by independent African tech press, but no independent, third-party evaluation of learning or economic outcomes has been published, and continuity depends on MTN renewing its annual CSR campaign.

Read the full analysis: https://techafricanews.com/2025/07/01/mtn-south-sudan-brings-digital-access-to-40000-residents-across-four-underserved-communities/