Dear AIN members, friends and colleagues,

First, I hope you and your families are safe, alive and well. We are all in shock of course with families affected in Nepal and concerned abroad. May you all go through this crisis with strength.

We have received numerous requests from all our membership on how best to support. I would like to give you the key information to help you understand how we are handling this.

 1.   Like for any emergency of this scale, the Humanitarian Country Team of the UN under OCHA’s gunews_idance is leading and coordinating the response in close collaboration with the government, and especial Dhangal, JS at MOHA. There are daily meeting in which Liz (WVI) and myself (HI) officially represent AIN and in which some other large humanitarian INGOs participate. All the information presented in these meetings as well as the whole humanitarian situation and operation set up is available on the following website: https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/ Please check it on a regular basis, as we will not forward anything to you directly. There will be a press conference by the UN on a daily basis.

2.      If your organisation specialises in response, please join the clusters as per the info on the sites.  Members that are active are numerous, I cannot name them all!

3.      INGOs who are responding (and those only at this stage) are invited to a meeting everyday at 3.00pm in the green tent on the right hand snews_ide of the UN House. We discuss funding, geographical positioning, coordination, thematic focus. It’s a short stand up meeting, come prepared with information. The point of this meeting is to make our operations as efficient as possible.

4.      If you hear of new INGOs coming in the country, please let them know about this, and pass on my and Reshma’s contact

5.      If your organisation does not specialise in response, we advise that you do not start any field work of significant scale, but rather that you and your staff help in your community. There is a lot to there by helping vulnerable people. It is extremely significant to work in that way – the focus should not only be on large groups of people, so your help there is important. Another option is to support the Red Cross financially, they are on the ground doing light search and rescue and distributions of food and non-food items and they need money rather than in-kind donations. Finally, the responders are short of field staff and logistics resources, so any help that you can provnews_ide of this kind to any INGO in your neighbourhood will be appreciated in Katmandu Valley and in the 21 affected districts. Please contact the INGO near you.  

6.      Every district has a coordinating INGO or UN agency or Red Cross chapter  called the DLSA – it isn’t totally in space yet, but this will be communicated on the site above.

7.      The UN is asking for information on the ground: anything relevant you have to provnews_ide, please send to eqcoordination@un.org.np but please do not clog this email unnecessarily.

8.      The core needs at the moment are trauma management, camp management, WASH, Shelter, logistics, food. If your headquarters are offering help but you don’t know how your response fits in, please enter into a consortium or subcontract a specialist.

9.      There is a mailing list for responders that includes new emergency teams coming in; if you want to be on it, please contact me.

Apologies for the delay in getting this to you, Lucky and Reshma have done their best to get the system back and running.

Wishing you the best in these circumstances

Sarah

AIN Vice Chair