Flash floods and landslides have hit south-eastern Bangladesh since 5 July, and an estimated 1.28 million people have been affected. More than 436,000 of them need humanitarian assistance. Homes, roads, water and sanitation facilities and farmland were damaged. All of that comes from a rapid gender analysis published on 30 July by the Gender in Humanitarian Action Working Group for Asia Pacific.
The analysis found that women, girls and people with disabilities have been affected more than others. They face higher barriers to reaching safety and essential services. The same is true of humanitarian assistance and of the chances to recover afterwards. The report also says they are carrying more caregiving and household work than before.
This is what we keep seeing when water rises fast. The warning rarely arrives as an official message. It spreads through weather sites, social media and messages from neighbours and community groups, and all of that needs data on a phone. Someone with no credit is outside every one of those channels. There is almost never a plan to evacuate people with disabilities, so everyone able to leave goes and the people who cannot are left where they are. That is not a choice they made; they stayed because nobody came for them. Afterwards they are stuck in the ruins of their homes, cut off from relief that concentrates at centralised aid points they cannot travel to, and reliant on the luck of a search team reaching the right house. Without credit on a phone they cannot call for help. 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.