Hong Kong Startups Come Together to Bring Relief Items to Nepal

How-to-help-nepal1 source: @KellyPhotos

On April 25th, the worst earthquake in over 80 years struck Nepal, killing over 7,000 people. The death toll continues to rise. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless. Aftershocks continue to rock the country, further damaging already weakened infrastructure and buildings. People need our help.

donatefornepal.org is a project to raise critical relief items (tents, tarpaulins and water purifiers/ water purification tablets) for Nepal from the Hong Kong community. We’re working with many Hong Kong startups to bring the relief items quickly to the people in need.

Uber will be using its extensive reach of drivers to pickup relief items with a simple click of a button through the Uber app. They are also helping with a large push to their mailing list of over 200,000 Hong Kongers to raise awareness about our campaign.
Uber will be providing free pickups of donated items throughout all of Hong Kong between Friday 8th and Saturday 9th of May, 11am-4pm.

There has been a fantastic show of support from a number of Hong Kong’s startups, joining forces to bring the relief to the people of Nepal as quickly as possible. Easyship are assisting with packing and shipping logistics, StuffGenie have offered their storage space for us to store donations and GoGoVan will be moving the packed items from StuffGenie’s warehouse to the airport.

We are working with and sending the donations to Childreach Nepal. They have people on the ground and have the best understanding of the needs of people of Nepal. They’ve told us that they desperately need tarpaulins, tents and water purifiers/ water purification tablets. People are sleeping on the streets and are afraid to enter their homes for fear of the structure collapsing.

Only donations in-kind which are urgently needed should be sent to places in such a critical time. Organisations on the ground, like Childreach, are the only ones that really know what is needed. Relief planes full of non-critical items such as clothes or teddy bears (it happened during the Haiti earthquake), can overburden airports and delay arrivals of more important things such as medical equipment and tents.

Childreach has been working in Nepal since 2009, and have a great understanding of the country. They have always worked in the rural, mountainous regions of Nepal, and these have been hit especially hard. Two of the villages they work in, Shermathang and Manikharka in Sindupalchok, have been completely destroyed. They have yet to hear from other villages they work in. Their staff and trustees in Kathmandu have been working around the clock to get clothing, food and medical supplies to those stranded in the rural villages.

Hong Kong has a proud history of coming together to help those in need during a time of crisis and we are hoping to do the same again by collecting as many tents, tarpaulins and water purifiers/ water purification tablets as we can for the people of Nepal.