Provide Helpdesks for Nepal Earthquake Survivors

In addition to daily aftershocks, a second large earthquake struck Nepal on May 12^th, injuring and displacing thousands more people. This has created an even more challenging situation and makes your support even more vital. Our team has worked day and night over the past 3 weeks, and the Mobile Citizen Helpdesk project has made great progress, evolving to meet the most pressing needs. We developed surveys and orientation materials, and established volunteers groups led by district coordinators to visit dozens of villages in the worst affected districts throughout the country.

The volunteers are continuing to do three things: i) collect feedback from citizens and officials on key challenges and opportunities in the relief efforts; ii) disseminate information to citizens on the recovery and help them use this information to solve problems; and iii) track funding and decision-making from the central to the local levels to ensure that aid is distributed in a fair and transparent way.

By visiting the hardest hit areas, our volunteers are identifying the key challenges to the earthquake relief process, including: a lack of uniformity in distribution of relief because of unclear provisions and instructions; language barriers in villages where populations speak local languages other than Nepali; a flood of people returning to their villages from Kathmandu, making it difficult to estimate the exact numbers of people in need; and corruption in the process of distributing aid and efforts on the part of some to over-claim relief supplies. The helpdesks are beginning to work with citizens and local officials to address these problems: translating concerns, tracking funding flows, connecting relief providers with those in greatest need, and coordinating with local journalists to document the challenges and solutions that are being found so that these can be shared more widely. 

To date the helpdesk volunteers have visited over 65 communities, directly solving over 100 problems for citizens. Our partner Local Interventions Group continues to work in the Prime Minister’s office to collect the data coming through the emergency hotline (which has been receiving over 100 calls an hour recently) and SMS platform, and then they are feeding this data into Kathmandu Living Labs’ “quake map.”

Thanks to your generous donations, we are now more than halfway towards meeting our crowdfunding goal! Please continue to help us spread the word as we prepare to continue this life-saving work in the many important months ahead.