Nepal glacial flood response · Rasuwa · 26 Aug 2026
Price your generosity
before you ship it.
This is a tool for protecting generosity from being wasted. The impulse to put something in a box and send it is the right impulse. What is in the box is the part nobody prices — so this page prices it, in USD, against the response that is actually running in Nepal right now.
A donated coat has to be flown, cleared, sorted, warehoused and — often enough — burned. Every one of those steps has a published rate. Put a consignment on the manifest below and the ledger works it the way a logistics officer would: at the kindest end of every sourced range, so a bad verdict is one you cannot argue with. Then it tells you what the same money delivers as cash.
Nothing here says don’t give. It says give the thing that arrives.
the box, before anyone weighs it
The response you would be sending into
Districts hit
Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, with impacts reported in Gorkha and Tanahun
as of 2026-08-27 · UNICEF, Aug 2026
The flash appeal
$49,600,000
for 84,000 people, launched 2026-09-04. That is $590 a person for the whole response — the yardstick the ledger measures your consignment against. United Nations in Nepal, Sep 2026
What the appeal asked for, in the order it asked
- 01direct cash assistance
- 02cold-weather shelter materials
- 03portable solar power units
- 04water purification systems
- 05food aid
- 06emergency mobile clinics
Cash is first. That ordering is the most important fact on this page: the response’s own priority list opens with the thing donors are least inclined to send.
The death and missing toll is not printed here. Within days of the event, published figures ran 160 → 359 → 538 → 579 → over 1,250, with thousands missing, depending on the source and the hour. A number that behaves like that gets fetched live with its timestamp and its attribution, or it does not get shown. The live route would be ReliefWeb, which since November 2025 requires a pre-approved app name and refuses everything else — so this build cannot fetch it, and therefore does not show it. Hardcoding it would be the exact failure this project is about.
The manifest
Build a consignment. Every line of the ledger opens to show the rate it used, the source it came from, the date, and the arithmetic. Where a publisher blocked automated retrieval, it says so.
- DECLARED VALUE$2,800.00
3 line items
- unusable used clothing-$1,615.00
15% of this class arrives usable
sourcehideassumption
Your Clothes Can Have an Afterlife — U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2022-05
0.05–0.15 fraction · as of 2022-05 · low confidence
High = 0.15 (NIST: only about 15% of used textiles get reused or recycled).
“Only about 15% of used clothes and other textiles in the United States get reused or recycled. The other 85% head straight to the landfill or incinerator.”
A US domestic reuse rate used as a proxy for a disaster consignment, which is a stretch in the donation's favour: sorted commercial textile streams recover more than a mixed emergency donation does, not less.
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
- not needed or not appropriate-$540.00
40% of this class arrives usable
sourcehideassumption
Why cash is better than in-kind donations — Airlink, 2023
0.1–0.4 fraction · as of 2023 · medium confidence
High = 1 − 0.60 (Airlink: 60% of goods arriving are not needed or appropriate). Low = 0.10 (Corbett et al., Production and Operations Management 2022: about 10% of unsolicited donations are high priority).
“60 percent of the goods that arrive during emergencies are not needed or appropriate for the recovery or the region.”
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
- air freight DEL→KTM-$84.00
56.0 kg × $1.50/kg
sourcehide
Air Freight: A Market Study with Implications for Landlocked Countries — World Bank, 2009-08
1.5–4.5 USD/kg · as of 2009-08 · low confidence
“Air freight rates generally range from $1.50–$4.50 per kilogram … 4–5 times that of road transport and 12–16 times that of sea transport.”
The most recent authoritative published range we could source, and it is from 2009 — treat it as a floor. The IRC reported air freight up 40–62% year-on-year in 2026. We do not apply that as a multiplier, because it was measured in a different corridor; the effect is that this app understates freight cost.
- sorting labour-$0.31
0.4 h × $0.70/h local wage
sourcehideassumption
Strategies for Managing Unsolicited Donations — Global Logistics Cluster, 2021
8–40 hours/tonne · as of 2021 · low confidence
No published hours-per-tonne figure was found for triaging unsolicited mixed goods, so this is an explicit assumption, not a citation. The low end assumes palletised uniform cartons; the high end assumes loose mixed clothing that must be opened, sorted and repacked by hand. Marked as an assumption in the UI wherever it appears.
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
- disposal-$4.14
43.1 kg unusable × $0.096/kg
sourcehideassumption
Discarded Textiles (Solid Waste Operator Training) — New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, 2020-01
0.096–0.3 USD/kg · as of 2020-01 · low confidence
$96 per ton ÷ 1,000 kg = $0.096/kg.
“350 tons x $96/ton = $33,600 in disposal costs/year.”
The low end is a documented US municipal tipping fee, used as a proxy. The high end is an assumption: the flood-affected districts have no formal landfill capacity, so unusable goods must be trucked back out over a damaged road network before they can be disposed of at all, which costs more than a tipping fee, not less.
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
- NET VALUE DELIVERED$556.55
Priced three times from the same table. Kindest reading $556.55, harshest -$339.73. The verdict does not hold: BURDENS at best, BECOMES ASH at worst. Which one is true depends on the freight rate this consignment actually gets and on whether anyone collects it.
The same $2,800.00 given as cash: $2,240.00 reaching affected people — 4.0× what this consignment delivers.
sourcehide
Submission to the FRLD Board on the use of cash transfers within the Fund's operating modalities — CALP Network, 2025-03
0.8 fraction · as of 2025-03 · medium confidence
“…meaning $80c in every $1 of L&D funding going directly to those most impacted.”
80 cents of every dollar reaching the affected person. Reported for loss-and-damage funding rather than emergency cash specifically, so it is the closest defensible figure rather than an exact one.
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
Handling these goods consumes the response’s own budget for 0.1 people.
sourcehide
UN and partners launch US$49.6 million flash appeal for people affected by the Rasuwa flood — United Nations in Nepal, 2026-09-04
590.48 USD/person · as of 2026-09-04 · high confidence
US$49,600,000 ÷ 84,000 people = $590.48 per person for the full appeal.
“The appeal seeks US$49.6 million to reach more than 84,000 people, prioritising direct cash assistance, cold-weather shelter materials, portable solar power units, water purification systems, food aid and emergency mobile clinics, with winter fast approaching.”
The whole appeal divided by the whole target caseload — shelter, water, health, food and cash together, not a cash transfer value. It is the response's own arithmetic, used here only as a yardstick.
Quoted from a search result: this publisher blocks automated retrieval, so the full text was not read. Listed as unverified on the sources page.
Lines tagged assumption are reasoned from guidance rather than quoted from a source. They are marked everywhere they appear, and the sources page lists every one of them.
The same money, sent differently
priced, not recommendedYour $2,800.00 spent instead on something the flash appeal named, in whole units, flown the same way and priced by the same engine at the same reading. Put one on the manifest and every figure above is recomputed from the sources.
1,866 × Water purification tablets (strip of 10)
LANDS
$2,799.00 declared · $2,630.87 delivered · 94% of it
+$2,074.32 more reaches the response than the manifest above, for the money already being spent.
112 × Portable solar lamp
LANDS
$2,800.00 declared · $2,592.33 delivered · 93% of it
+$2,035.78 more reaches the response than the manifest above, for the money already being spent.
62 × New insulated jacket, sized and packed
LANDS
$2,790.00 declared · $2,566.22 delivered · 92% of it
+$2,009.67 more reaches the response than the manifest above, for the money already being spent.
Cash is first on the appeal’s own priority list, and none of these beat it — the links at the foot of this page are where it goes. What is above is the best of the things that come in a box.
The reply from the warehouse
prose by a model, figures by the engineThe receiving end of this consignment, writing back. A language model writes the prose and is never shown a single figure — not the declared value, not the weight, not even the item labels, several of which carry a size. It marks where a number belongs and the engine fills them in afterwards. A draft that states a number of its own is thrown away whole, unread, and what you get instead is the letter this build writes with no model in the loop.
Where to send it instead
Deadweight accepts nothing. Every link below goes off this site to a page that can take a donation — not to an organisation’s homepage — and each of them can buy in the region what a container of goods spends its whole value trying to get there. They are in order: the further up, the more of the dollar is spent inside Nepal by someone who was already there.
- GlobalGiving Nepal Flood Relief FundFlexible grants to Nepali organisations already working in the districts — in-region procurement under another name, which is the whole argument of this page.
- Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief FundNepal’s own fund, taking cards from anywhere in the world. Spendable by law on rescue, treatment, relief, rehabilitation and infrastructure — not on administration — and audited annually.The Kathmandu Post, Aug 2026
- IFRC Nepal flash floods appealFunds the Nepal Red Cross Society, which was in the affected districts before there was an appeal to write.The New York Times, Sep 2026
- Direct Relief — Nepal flood reliefMedical supply, procured against a request from the field rather than donated in kind.