diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 44af6a8a5..8c28f9faa 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -4,7 +4,6 @@
   <br/>
 </p>
 
-
 <p align="center">
     <i>Your go-to toolkit for lightning-fast, flexible LLM evaluation, from Hugging Face's Leaderboard and Evals Team.</i>
 </p>
@@ -93,6 +92,14 @@ lighteval accelerate \
     "leaderboard|truthfulqa:mc|0|0"
 ```
 
+### 🔒Offline Usage
+If you are working in a restricted or offline network environment (e.g., behind a firewall or in an air-gapped setting),
+lighteval now supports loading datasets from a local path.
+```shell
+export LOCAL_DATASET_PATH=/path/to/your/local/dataset
+```
+Make sure the local directory contains the dataset in a structure compatible with the Hugging Face datasets library.
+
 ## 🙏 Acknowledgements
 
 Lighteval started as an extension of the fantastic [Eleuther AI
diff --git a/src/lighteval/tasks/extended/tiny_benchmarks/main.py b/src/lighteval/tasks/extended/tiny_benchmarks/main.py
index d195bc89b..290236674 100644
--- a/src/lighteval/tasks/extended/tiny_benchmarks/main.py
+++ b/src/lighteval/tasks/extended/tiny_benchmarks/main.py
@@ -92,6 +92,10 @@ def __init__(self, task: str):
     def download(self):
         # Likely to crash in // processes if we don't include the pkl
         path_dld = os.path.join(pathlib.Path(__file__).parent.resolve(), "tinyBenchmarks.pkl")
+        local_dataset_path = os.getenv("LOCAL_DATASET_PATH", None)
+        if local_dataset_path is not None:
+            # If LOCAL_DATASET_PATH is set, use it as the tinyBenchmarks path
+            path_dld = os.path.join(local_dataset_path, "tinyBenchmarks.pkl")
         # Downloading files
         if not os.path.isfile(path_dld):
             url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/felipemaiapolo/tinyBenchmarks/main/tinyBenchmarks/tinyBenchmarks.pkl"
diff --git a/src/lighteval/utils/utils.py b/src/lighteval/utils/utils.py
index 28e0ac4a4..ed9826157 100644
--- a/src/lighteval/utils/utils.py
+++ b/src/lighteval/utils/utils.py
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
 # WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 # See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 # limitations under the License.
+import os
 from dataclasses import asdict, is_dataclass
 from typing import Callable, TypeVar, Union
 
@@ -210,6 +211,11 @@ def download_dataset_worker(
     Worker function to download a dataset from the HuggingFace Hub.
     Used for parallel dataset loading.
     """
+    local_dataset_path = os.getenv("LOCAL_DATASET_PATH", None)
+    if local_dataset_path is not None:
+        # If LOCAL_DATASET_PATH is set, use it as the dataset path
+        dataset_path = local_dataset_path
+
     dataset = load_dataset(
         path=dataset_path,
         name=dataset_config_name,