UN Women published a Gender Alert on 2 September on the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, on 15 August. By 30 August the earthquake had killed 111 people, injured 1,629 and displaced 188,161 across eight districts. Nine hospitals and 68 community health centres were damaged. The alert was produced with Indonesia’s Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, UNFPA and the Indonesia Humanitarian Coordination Platform.
The alert says people with disabilities are a significant proportion of those affected. It identifies gaps in safe and inclusive evacuation facilities and heightened protection risks in the displacement settings, including gender-based violence and limited access to maternal and reproductive health services. It asks for that to change. Specifically it wants shelter, water and sanitation built so people with disabilities can use them, and it wants women’s organisations and people with disabilities involved in running the response.
An earthquake isn’t a single event for a person with a disability. Where there’s no plan to evacuate them, everyone able-bodied leaves and they stay in their own home or its ruins. Nobody came for them, and staying wasn’t a decision they made. Afterwards they are isolated in a damaged area the health workers and assessment teams can’t get to, and cut off from relief that concentrates where people were able to travel. Credit on a phone keeps someone inside the conversations a warning travels through — the weather updates, the news, the messages from neighbours — and it lets them call for help getting out. It also lets a woman with a disability report violence in a displacement site without going through the person she’d be reporting. We believe that giving people with disabilities free phone credit before a disaster, for use in everyday life, means survival when the worst happens.
Calling for Help exists to close that gap. Digital inequality leaves refugees with disabilities cut off from help that already exists, so we send free mobile top-ups every month and the person uses them to reach whoever is best placed to help — a caseworker, a clinic, a local organisation, their own family.
We believe it is the most cost-effective humanitarian aid there is. Nobody has to be employed to find them and nobody has to travel: the credit arrives on the number they already use, once they have passed AI-based identity and anti-fraud checks. The pilot has a limited number of places while we find out what it changes.
If you have a disability and are living as a refugee, or you support someone who is, apply to the pilot. To follow what we find, join the newsletter.