1. April 25, 2015
The day the earth shook…
- Nepal
11:55 AM6

2. Building back better!
Longer-term goal:

3. Immediate need:
Damage survey of 1 million houses

4. Traditionally…
▶ Thousands of surveyors
▶ Stacks of paper questionnaire
▶ Conduct survey for months
▶ Bring back heaps of filled up forms
▶ Spend another few months transcribing the data
▶ And then only start analyzing data to formulate
intervention plans

5. How a 7.8 Mg earthquake started
a digital revolution in Nepal

6. This time, we used electronic tablets:
▶ Better data quality
▶ Zero transcription time
▶ Zero transcription cost
▶ Shorter turnaround period
▶ Enhanced data security
▶ Richer dataset (GPS, pictures of a million houses)
▶ Near real-time data

7. 76% of the total data to be surveyed
were collected and usable within the
first 100 days of the survey

8. Challenge: Non-tech
▶ Momentous shift from paper to digital survey
▶ Hiring, deploying 2,500 survey teams
▶ Keeping all stakeholders on the same page
▶ Procuring and managing survey logisitics

9. Challenge: Tech
▶ Totally offline
▶ Compress photos (from 5 MB to 0.4 MB)
▶ Upload photos separately from text data
▶ Battery life
▶ (Near) real-time?

10. Output

16. Larger Output

18. Outcome

19. Building back better!
Longer-term goal:

20. April 25, 2015
The day the earth shook…
- Nepal
11:55 AM6

21. www.kathmandulivinglabs.org
kathmandulivinglabs@gmail.com