Kathmandu, February 25

A joint initiative of Ncell and Flowminder Foundation to identify displacement and pattern of people’s movement to better target the humanitarian support after the devastating earthquake of April 25, 2015, has won the award for ‘Mobile in Emergency or Humanitarian Situations’ at the GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards 2016.

The initiative was last month short-listed as one of the nominees and GSM Association handed over the award to Ncell and Flowminder on Tuesday amid a function at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as per a statement issued today.

Rajesh Lal Nyachhon of Ncell along with Linus Bengtsson and Erik Wetter of Flowminder received

the award.

In the initiative, Ncell during the earthquakes in 2015, had provided anonymised network data to Swedish research foundation Flowminder, which then generated information on people displacement in the wake of the disaster. This information was part of the regular UN update to aid organisations and was critical in ensuring that relief efforts were directed to the right regions.

The updates helped relief agencies to better manage logistics to cater to the relief needs such as food, water, medicines and shelter. It also helped to understand the need for post-earthquake rehabilitation and reconstruction, and to learn the effect of people migration during such crisis.

“The initiative received great response from the humanitarian aid community to channelise support effectively after the earthquake last year,” the statement quotes Erim Taylanlar, CEO of Ncell, as saying. “GSMA Global Mobile Awards is,

indeed, an important achievement. We have been able to demonstrate with example how mobile companies can play an important role in disaster response.”

Although there has been use of mobile phone data in the past to measure population movements, this was the first time the method was adopted to track movement in an ongoing ‘live’ situation, helping to understand where the people are and to channelise the rescue and relief efforts accordingly, making the works more efficient.

The initiative had shown that two weeks after the quake, 500,000 people had left the Kathmandu Valley. Most of them travelled to the surrounding districts and the Tarai areas in the south and southeast of the country. On a wider scale across the country, an estimated 1.8 million people had left their home district.