Volunteer
Volunteeryour skills.
You do not need to travel to Nepal to help.
Some of the problems created or exposed by this disaster require expertise that exists all over the world. Nepal Hackathon assembles online teams around problems identified by people already working on them in Nepal.
Despite the name, this is not primarily a weekend coding competition. A team in Nepal defines the problem: what is happening, what is already being done, what capability is missing, and what would actually help. We then try to bring the right people together around it.
You might contribute three hours of specialist knowledge, work intensively for several days, or stay with a project for months.
This is remote work, and that is the point
Do not travel into affected communities unless a recognised response organisation has specifically asked for your skills on the ground. Unrequested international volunteers place additional demands on transport, accommodation and the response systems already under strain.
Everything on this page can be done from wherever you are.
How you can work
- 01
Live
Join the kickoff call and work alongside a team while it forms. Best if you want to help shape what gets built.
- 02
Asynchronous
Take a defined piece of work and return it on your own schedule. Most contributors outside Nepal work this way — the time difference makes it the normal case, not the exception.
- 03
Both
Start live, keep going async. Teams that continue past the weekend almost all end up here.
Where your skill fits
These are the areas the registration form asks about, and the project areas that named each one. Pick everything that applies to you — most useful teams are mixed.
Data and GIS
Connect hazard information to what is downstream of it — settlements, roads, bridges, schools, health facilities, hydropower. Much of this data exists already, in separate systems and at different dates, so no single view shows what is at stake.
Named by
- Alert and monitoring
- Danger zones
- Risk, inequality and development
- Public health and continuity of care
- Environment, watersheds and recovery
Climate science
Find where glaciers, glacial lakes, snow cover and terrain are changing fastest, and therefore where closer monitoring is worth the effort. Nepal and ICIMOD hold the expertise and much of the data.
Named by
- Alert and monitoring
- Danger zones
- Climate-warming risk
- Environment, watersheds and recovery
AI and engineering
Make large volumes of imagery and documents reviewable. The objective is not a system that invents answers — it is helping someone find the underlying evidence, source, map or dataset quickly.
Named by
- Alert and monitoring
- Drones and remote sensing
- Public health and continuity of care
Product and design
Turn analysis into something a responder can act on under pressure, and make sure the result is usable by the people it is for rather than impressive to the people who built it.
Named by
- Risk, inequality and development
- Public health and continuity of care
Economics
Show why the same flood does very different damage depending on road access, communications, healthcare and how quickly a community can recover — and where investment would change that most.
Named by
- Risk, inequality and development
- Environment, watersheds and recovery
Drones and remote sensing
Drone teams in Nepal are already flying. The bottleneck is what happens next: turning footage into damage maps, blocked-road assessments and searchable imagery fast enough to matter. That part can be done from anywhere.
Named by
- Danger zones
- Climate-warming risk
- Drones and remote sensing
Communications
Help verified information travel, and help it travel accurately. This includes writing for people who are frightened and in a hurry.
Useful across areas
Not named by a specific area, which does not mean it is not needed — it means no brief has claimed it yet.
Fundraising
Find the continuation funding that keeps useful work alive past the weekend. Thirty, sixty or ninety days of support is often the difference between a project continuing and disappearing.
Useful across areas
Not named by a specific area, which does not mean it is not needed — it means no brief has claimed it yet.
Cloud and compute
Make the technology boring and reliable: hosting, pipelines, security, monitoring, and costs a Nepali institution can actually carry. Also whether it works when connectivity is weak.
Named by
- Climate-warming risk
- Drones and remote sensing
Private-sector partnerships
Open doors to capability rather than cheques — imagery, satellite tasking, GPU capacity, APIs, connectivity, equipment, and engineers who can be lent to a problem.
Useful across areas
Not named by a specific area, which does not mean it is not needed — it means no brief has claimed it yet.
Field operations in Nepal
If you are already responding on the ground, you are the side of this that matters most. Tell us where additional capacity would help rather than waiting to be asked.
Useful across areas
Not named by a specific area, which does not mean it is not needed — it means no brief has claimed it yet.
Translation (Nepali or other languages of Nepal)
Make briefs, findings and tools usable in the languages of the people affected. This is not a nice-to-have on a project whose output is meant to stay in Nepal.
Useful across areas
Not named by a specific area, which does not mean it is not needed — it means no brief has claimed it yet.
Two things this page does not tell you
Who in Nepal is leading each area, and what their brief asks for right now. Both are named at the kickoff by the teams themselves, because the programme is explicit that Nepal defines the work — not a page written in advance.
That is also why registering asks what you know rather than which project you want. Matching happens after the briefs exist.
How to join
- 01Tell us what you know, what you can access, and how much time you have.
- 02We match that against the briefs Nepal-side teams bring to the kickoff.
- 03You join a team — live, asynchronously, or both.