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August 30, 2026 · Gender in emergencies

Rapid Gender Analysis: Bhotekoshi and Trishuli Flash Flood, Nepal, August 2026

TGLF Insights Unit
Illustration of a woman in a blue dress signalling with a radio toward an origami-style paper helicopter, standing before layered red, teal and grey terrain representing the Nepal flood response

The TGLF Insights Team prepared this analysis on 30 August 2026, four days into the emergency, using TGLF’s decolonial rapid gender analysis (dRGA) framework.

Executive summary

Obstetric emergencies keep arriving whether or not the water recedes. Trishuli Hospital cannot manage complex deliveries, every bridge between Trishuli and Betrawati is gone, and the hospital’s medical superintendent says helicopter evacuation is the only referral option and is not always available (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). One woman in a displacement camp went into labour and reached Kathmandu by air only after her family appealed repeatedly. 14 aircraft are flying in the corridor. Obstetric cases compete for those seats with body recovery, relief cargo and stranded travellers, and we found no tasking rule giving them priority (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). Around 3 in 100 births need surgery or blood that this corridor cannot reach by road. One line in the daily air tasking order and one phone number a camp health worker can call would fix it, without new aircraft or new money.

6 findings based on public information available online

  1. Pregnant women, new mothers and infants are in camps with no safe water. Both piped sources serving Trishuli Hospital and nearby settlements were destroyed, toilet drainage is failing, displaced people are drinking whatever they can find, and residents call the camp food inadequate. The medical superintendent has warned publicly of a possible epidemic (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  2. Most displaced people are not in camps, so camp-based services will miss the women who need them most. They are staying with neighbours, in temporary shelters and in open spaces (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August). Dignity kits, sanitary materials, lockable latrines, female focal points and protection referrals all currently assume a managed site. A woman in a neighbour’s house may have no latrine of her own, no privacy to wash or change, and no route to report anything.
  3. Entitlements are attached to houses, households and death certificates, which is where women lose them. The government grant is NPR 500,000 per mountain house and the planned livelihood grant is NPR 90,000 per household by bank transfer (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August). Municipal offices, records, letterheads and official stamps in Gosaikunda and Uttargaya were swept away (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). Nepali research finds most women depend on male relatives for land access (Allendorf, 2007). A woman whose husband is missing rather than confirmed dead may face a DNA process that police expect to take 5 to 6 months before she can claim anything.
  4. A force allocation decision created the protection risk in the settlements, and the same decision can reverse it. 7 or 8 police officers cover 3 camps and a hospital while the Army, Armed Police Force and Rapid Action Teams concentrate on search and tunnel rescue. Armed men on motorcycles drove doctors away from an operation on 28 August, and looting is happening in daylight (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). Nepal’s baseline is 27.2% of ever-married women aged 15 to 49 reporting intimate partner violence, and a 2024 assessment found the health system poorly prepared to respond to gender-based violence before this disaster (Sapkota and others, 2024; Deuba and others, 2024).
  5. The women critical in this response may lack seat where allocation is decided. Chameli Gurung, vice-chair of Uttargaya, is feeding and sheltering around 750 people from an office that no longer exists. Prabha Bogati, deputy mayor of Bidur, led the reunification of more than 100 children. Sabita Aryal in Siddhalek is directing route clearance. Pratima Tamang, vice-chair of Gosaikunda, is missing (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). Yet, we found no Nepali women-led organisation in the cluster architecture. Nepal has more than 50,000 Female Community Health Volunteers whose documented constraint is unpaid workload rather than skill (Kharel and others, 2022; Tikkanen and others, 2024).
  6. Disaggregating by sex alone will still miss the women where the disaster began. Rasuwa, where settlements were erased, has the lowest body recovery count of the 8 districts, which measures road access rather than impact. Officials and settlement names indicate predominantly Tamang and Tibetan-descent communities, and surnames in the reporting also indicate Dalit households among the displaced. We found no source disaggregating by caste or ethnicity, and the IFRC targeting commitment lists many categories without naming either (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).

What we could not find out

We found no sex-disaggregated figure for deaths, missing people, injuries, displacement or affected households in any source we reviewed. The only sex-specific data we located is a mortuary count. Of 154 bodies recovered in Nawalparasi East as of 29 August, 52 were adult men, 34 adult women, 11 girls and 8 boys, and forensic staff could not determine the sex of 49, which is 32% of the sample (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). One age split exists and it is modelled rather than observed. Of 8,830 people estimated vulnerable within 43,500 exposed, 2,535 are children, or 29%, and 561 are older people, or 6% (PDC early impact analysis, 26 August).

Nobody currently knows how many pregnant women are displaced, how many households are newly headed by a woman, whether girls and boys are being separated and reunified at different rates, or how many older women are without their medicines. Every number in this response is being produced now, in templates still being written. Adding sex, age, disability, caste and ethnicity fields costs nothing today and will be far more difficult to retrofit later.

4 actions for this week based on our findings

  1. Add obstetric, newborn and paediatric emergencies to the standing priority list for the aircraft already deployed, with one duty officer reachable by satellite phone and reserved rotary-wing hours each day.
  2. Move unrestricted cash to Female Community Health Volunteers, Health Mother’s Groups and Nepal Red Cross sub-chapters in the 3 districts, with no proposal process and a daily payment attached.
  3. Deliver water, sanitation and dignity items to dispersed displaced households as well as managed sites, and install sex-separated lockable lit latrines wherever more than 50 people are sheltering.
  4. Require every situation report and registration form to carry sex, age, disability, caste and ethnicity, with an explicit line for unknown.

Recommendations 5 to 8 cover protection, safeguarding, compensation and the follow-up analysis, each with actor, action, evidence and the budget line or decision seat.

What we were able to find about who is affected

The figures disagree, and we could not find reports that disaggregate by gender

We found discrepancies between reported figures from different sources. For example, two reports issued on the same day differ by a factor of 2 on deaths.

Household figures diverge the same way. The IFRC cites about 18,000 households affected with more than 6,000 homes completely damaged, the NDRRMA estimates about 10,000 households requiring immediate relief, and the NDRRMA relief request is calculated against 8,692 households, or 43,460 individuals (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August; IOM situation report 1, 27 August). Household counts decide who receives a tent, a tarpaulin and a cash grant, and none of them records who heads the household.

A response planning caseloads for pregnant and lactating women, unaccompanied children, older women, people with disabilities and female-headed households has to estimate all of them from national rates. Those estimates will be wrong at settlement level, and most wrong in Rasuwa, where communications are weakest and impact highest.

The reporting convention already exists

The Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) published an age split of its modelled exposure. Nepal Police published a mortuary count broken down by adult men, adult women, girls and boys, with an explicit unsexed category at 32%. Published research stratified Nepal Police mortality data from the 2015 Gorkha earthquake by sex, age and district across 41 districts (Tonnelier and others, 2024). The capability is domestic and demonstrated. What we were unable to find, in the first four days, is the explicit instruction to apply it in daily reporting.

Health: the referral chain for pregnancy and birth is cut

Terrain and distance existed before 26 August: a single-corridor road network with no redundancy carried the entire maternal referral function. Losing the bridges turned a strained system into an air-only system where obstetric cases compete for seats.

  • Trishuli Hospital cannot handle complex deliveries and must refer to Kathmandu. Every bridge between Trishuli and Betrawati is washed away, and in places mud has buried the road with barely a trace left (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • Medical superintendent Rajendra Lama said: “The bigger problem is bringing pregnant women to the hospital and taking them home. If we need to refer a patient, there is no option other than evacuation by helicopter.” He added that helicopters are not always available when patients need urgent evacuation (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • A woman went into labour at a camp near Trishuli Hospital, the hospital could not manage the delivery, the family had no road access, and she was airlifted to Paropakar Maternity and Women’s Hospital in Kathmandu on the morning of 29 August after repeated appeals (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • 14 helicopters were deployed by the afternoon of 26 August, 6 Nepali Army and 8 private, with more on standby, and an Army MI-17 carrying an Emergency Medical Rescue Team went to Trishuli. Helicopters are the primary means of access, and weather has intermittently grounded flights (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August; PDC early impact analysis, 26 August).
  • 20 specialist Army doctors, including 2 surgeons, were positioned at Maithali Barracks rather than at Trishuli Hospital because access to the hospital was disrupted (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). Surgical capacity moved away from the facility women in labour are sent to.

Most flood health impacts decline as water recedes. Births do not. In a displaced population this size, deliveries continue at a predictable daily rate, and a predictable share need caesarean section, blood or newborn resuscitation. Each day without a reserved evacuation route runs that arithmetic against the response.

After the April 2015 earthquake, the response reached 1.4 million affected women and adolescent girls through the Minimum Initial Service Package, including medical camp kits and nurses with birth attendance skills (Chaudhary and others, 2017). A 2015 commentary on birthing centre infrastructure recommended starting from the most severely affected districts (Mahato and others, 2015). We found no Minimum Initial Service Package assessment for this emergency. The health cluster is active and is the body to run one (IOM situation report 1, 27 August).

Project HOPE worked with midwives and local communities in 2016 and 2017, reaching more than 5,000 women and children through door-to-door visits and nutrition programmes, and its emergency response team is on the ground (Project HOPE situation report 1, 27 August). Female Community Health Volunteers were the first available health personnel in communities during the 2015 earthquakes (Bhattarai and others, 2022).

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are hitting older women hardest, and money does not solve it

Medication has been interrupted for 3 days or more in the cases reported, and it is reaching women who had assets, so targeting the poorest alone will miss much of this caseload.

  • Rekha Devi Gosain of Trishuli Bazaar lives with diabetes, high blood pressure and thyroid disease. The flood swept away her home, 4 shops she owned, her vehicle and her motorcycle, and she had no time to save her medicines. Her son Raghubir said: “My mother has to take her medicines regularly, but the hospital does not have them. It has been three days since she was able to take them.”
  • Kopila Pariyar, caring for her 62-year-old asthmatic mother, said: “My mother has asthma and needs two or three medicines, but we have not been able to get all of them.” Her 16-year-old brother Abinash and 43-year-old sister-in-law Shanti are missing.
  • Hospital pharmacist Maheshwar Yadav said atenolol and losartan were unavailable and that “our hospital insurance programme is also not operating because there is no internet, and we are running out of medicines.”
  • Information officer Rikesh Rana said many displaced people nearby have diabetes, high blood pressure or asthma and cannot get their usual medicines, while the hospital has no cooking gas and its ambulances are short of diesel (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).

Both documented cases are older women with chronic conditions, and in both a family member is managing the search for medicines. Care work here is falling on daughters and sons who are themselves displaced, without cash, and searching for missing relatives. The government has directed free treatment for flood victims, and the IFRC names people with NCDs as requiring special attention (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August). Free treatment does not help when the shelf is empty and the insurance system is offline. A woman who owned 4 shops cannot obtain routine medication, which points to a severed supply chain rather than poverty, and means poverty-targeted resupply will not fix it.

Water and sanitation: the risk falls on people who cannot leave a camp

  • The flood destroyed the canal serving the Trishuli hydropower project and a separate pipeline through Tupche, removing both drinking water sources for Trishuli Hospital and surrounding settlements. Rajendra Lama said: “With so many people living together in one place, there is a risk of disease spreading. The lack of safe drinking water and proper toilets raises the possibility of an epidemic.” The same reporting describes poor drainage from toilets and camp food residents call inadequate, and flags the concern for pregnant women, new mothers and people who are ill (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • Kopila Pariyar, sheltering at Kolani camp, said: “There is no drinking water in the camp and we cannot even buy bottled water. We have no money, no clothes and there is almost nothing to buy in the Kolani market” (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • Modelled daily requirements for the exposed population are 26,400 litres of water, 18.5 million calories and 30,400 square metres of shelter (PDC early impact analysis, 26 August).
  • Gender-responsive items are already on the government request list, which includes dignity kits, baby kits, sanitary materials and family hygiene kits alongside 8,692 tents and tarpaulins (IOM situation report 1, 27 August). We found no confirmation of delivery or of who received them.
  • WHO has provided medicines and multipurpose tents and supports disease surveillance. The IFRC plans epidemic preparedness work, hygiene-kit distribution and rehabilitation of drinking water schemes (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August; IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).

Water collection and household care work fall on women and girls here, so losing both engineered sources converts into hours of unpaid labour and contact with untreated surface water. The people who cannot walk further are the ones the medical superintendent named: women late in pregnancy, women who have just delivered, and women caring for someone ill. Menstrual hygiene needs water, privacy and somewhere to wash or dispose of materials, and toilet drainage is already failing at the sites reported. Sanitary materials on a request list are not a service until they arrive with water and a lockable door.

Most displaced people are in neighbours’ houses and open spaces rather than managed sites, which puts them outside camp-based water, sanitation and protection services and outside most counting (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August). IOM is verifying whether 2 multi-purpose evacuation centres it built and handed over in Rasuwa and Dhading are currently housing displaced people (IOM situation report 1, 27 August).

Do not assume the nutrition outcome either way. After the 2015 earthquake, a longitudinal study of around 1,000 households found nutrition and food security comparable or improved 1 year later, offering livelihood resilience or effective intervention as untested hypotheses (Thorne-Lyman and others, 2018). Measure nutrition by gender in these settlements, counting pregnant and lactating women and children under 5 separately.

Protection: the conditions are documented, the incidents are not

  • Rajendra Lama reported 7 or 8 police officers deployed around Trishuli Hospital and nearby areas, leaving residents and medical staff increasingly vulnerable, and said: “Looting has started during the day itself. We need more police patrols and security.” On 28 August, 4 or 5 masked men arrived on motorcycles and reportedly drove away doctors carrying out an operation. Looting has since started at houses in the surrounding area, and black-market activity has made basic goods hard to obtain (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • The IFRC appeal states that people displaced into neighbours’ houses or open spaces face amplified risk, and commits to psychosocial support, awareness of prevention of sexual and gender-based violence with referral pathways promoted particularly among children and women, and monitoring for potential signs of human trafficking (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).
  • The protection cluster is active and IOM is participating in it (IOM situation report 1, 27 August).

Force allocation drives the immediate risk. Nepal’s Army, Armed Police Force, Nepal Police and Rapid Action Teams are deployed across Rasuwa and downstream districts, concentrated on search, recovery and tunnel rescue, leaving 7 or 8 officers around civilian settlements at Trishuli (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). The harm reported so far came from armed outsiders exploiting that gap. In the evidence we found, men in the affected population appear as the dead, as rescuers and as carers, and we found nothing supporting a characterisation of them as the source of danger.

Analysis of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2022 found 27.2% of ever-married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced at least 1 type of intimate partner violence, comprising 23.2% physical, 12.8% emotional and 7.1% sexual, with the strongest associations being controlling behaviour by the husband, fear of the husband, frequent alcohol use by the husband, and no formal education (Sapkota and others, 2024). Earlier analysis found risk higher among rural women and women with low economic and educational status, which describes these districts (Ahmad and Jaleel, 2015). A 2024 assessment of 11 hospitals and 17 primary health care centres in Madhesh Province found health system readiness to manage gender-based violence and deliver psychosocial counselling was already weak before this disaster (Deuba and others, 2024).

Read that as a projection from structure rather than a measurement. Displacement into unlit open spaces and other people’s houses, without cash, privacy or police presence, and with a service pathway that was weak before the flood, intensifies every documented risk factor at once. The practical implication is that the referral pathway to clinical care and psychosocial support should be built and staffed before anyone collects data on these issues, because collecting disclosure with nowhere to refer may cause harm.

Safeguarding is planned inside at least one agency

  • The IFRC will provide updated training on protection from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment to relevant volunteers and staff, and will support community engagement and accountability work including feedback mechanisms (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).
  • A government toll-free number, 1234, exists for reports of missing, trapped and stranded people (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). We found no equivalent channel for reporting exploitation, abuse or fraud.
  • The government has asked Meta and TikTok to remove scam donation QR codes alongside graphic content, artificial-intelligence-generated videos and misinformation, which confirms extraction from the aid stream in at least one form (Kathmandu Post, National section).
  • Risk factors present are displacement into unmanaged settings, aid delivered largely by uniformed security actors, collapsed local administration with no functioning records, rapid inflows of private cash and in-kind donations, and 89,863 Red Cross volunteers plus government and private actors operating across a corridor with no telephone network in the worst-hit areas (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August; Kathmandu Post, 29 August).

One agency training its own volunteers does not safeguard the response. What is missing is a route a woman in a neighbour’s house, with no phone signal and no documents, can use, which means a person physically present at every distribution point.

Money, records and entitlements

Nepali law makes local government the primary responder, and in the worst-hit units that responder has stopped existing as an institution. Every entitlement that depends on a record is now a gendered risk.

  • In Gosaikunda the flood swept away the main office and 2 ward offices. Chairman Kaisang Nurpu Tamang said: “My rural municipality has more than 2,000 people, including the vice-chair, two ward chiefs and seven members of my own family, who have gone missing in the flood.” In Uttargaya the office at Laharepauwa disappeared with all records inside. Engineer Jiban Bhatta said: “Even the rural municipality’s letterhead and official stamp are gone. Collecting damage details, identifying people who need relief and carrying out administrative work have been severely affected.” Chameli Gurung said: “There is no telephone network and no electricity. We have no contact with anyone. We do not know who is where. You ask us for data. On what basis can we provide it? Please restore the telephone network and electricity first” (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • The government’s approved Shock Responsive and Social Protection Relief Standards set a cash grant of NPR 500,000, approximately CHF 2,700, for a house in mountainous areas. The IFRC plans conditional livelihood cash grants of NPR 90,000 per household, approximately CHF 480, by bank transfer through financial service providers, and will support authorities in completing the detailed damage assessment (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).
  • The government is providing cash grants to families of those who died, free medical treatment for injured people, and financial assistance to affected households (IOM situation report 1, 27 August). Nepal Police expect final DNA matches for unidentified remains to take 5 to 6 months (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).

4 gates where a woman may lose her entitlement. Ownership, because the grant follows the house and Nepali research finds women who own land are significantly more likely to have the final say in household decisions while most women depend on male relatives for land access (Allendorf, 2007). Headship, because the grant follows the household and the record establishing headship is destroyed. Identity, because bank transfer requires an account and documents that were in houses swept away. Death, because a widow whose husband is missing rather than confirmed dead may wait 5 to 6 months for a DNA match with no municipal record behind her.

The appeal states that the Nepal Red Cross Society will apply a gender and diversity-sensitive analysis targeting women-headed households, pregnant and lactating women, single women, people with disabilities, older people, children, survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, and displaced people, and will coordinate with local governments on inclusive targeting criteria (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August). One decision will test that commitment: whether the detailed damage assessment accepts alternative evidence of household composition where records are gone.

Displaced people have no cash in a market where goods are scarce and black-market priced, while planned livelihood transfers move by bank transfer requiring documents that may have been swept away. Nepal has documented women-managed community loan funds built for this gap, shown to increase access to cash and reduce delays in care seeking (Morrison and others, 2010b).

Who inside “women and girls” is furthest from help

Tamang and other indigenous highland women

  • Body recovery as of the evening of 28 August, per the NDRRMA: Chitwan 233, Nawalparasi East 154, Gorkha 46, Dhading 40, Nuwakot 37, Tanahun 31, Nawalparasi West 27, Rasuwa 12 (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). Rasuwa, where whole settlements were erased, is last. That figure measures road and helicopter access.
  • The flood devastated Timure, Syabrubesi and other settlements along the upper Bhotekoshi, destroying houses, markets, customs facilities, security posts and vehicles, and severing communication particularly between Timure and Syabrubesi (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August).
  • The names of missing and surviving local officials in these units, among them Pratima Tamang, Kaisang Nurpu Tamang, Dawa Mingmar Tamang, Kami Chhiring Tamang, Sonam Chhiring Ghale, Kami Shedar Ghale and Pema Dorje Ghale, indicate predominantly Tamang and Tibetan-descent communities (Kathmandu Post, 29 August). Rasuwa Chief District Officer Narendra Pariyar said return through the Rasuwagadhi border is not currently possible and that “It could take months just to reopen the road.”

Sex disaggregation alone will not surface this. Peer-reviewed work in Nepal finds caste and women’s autonomy interact to determine whether women complete postnatal care (Morang postnatal care study, 2023), and analysis of a large nutrition programme found caste and wealth variation in programme reach for maternal outcomes (Cunningham and others, 2024). National district-level work locates the highest combined hazard exposure and lowest service access in exactly this kind of single-road border setting (Gautam, 2017). Without caste and ethnicity fields, a response can report reaching women and still miss Tamang women in the units where the disaster began.

Surnames in the reporting we reviewed, including among displaced residents at Kolani camp, are commonly associated with Dalit communities. This is an inference from naming and nothing more. We raise it because Health Mother’s Group research identifies Janajati caste membership as a barrier to participation (Acharya and others, 2022), so community-based distribution can reproduce exclusion unless someone checks. Verify it in registration rather than treating this analysis as evidence of it.

Girls and boys, separated and uncounted

  • Of 8,830 people estimated vulnerable, 2,535 are children, or 29% (PDC early impact analysis, 26 August). 68 schools sit within the modelled exposure zone, and IOM reports damage to schools (IOM situation report 1, 27 August).
  • In Uttargaya, officials report cases where parents remain missing while children reached safety, leaving officials unable to establish complete family details. Bidur Municipality helped more than 100 students who could not reach their families after a bridge was swept away, and Deputy Mayor Prabha Bogati wrote: “We were able to bring around 100 schoolchildren stranded on both sides of the Trishuli river back into their parents’ arms.” At Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School, which had 1,400 students, an army helicopter airlifted 40 students and teachers to Bidur on 28 August with another 10 to 15 still waiting. Principal Rajendra Dawadi said: “The river is flowing through the school grounds. We have students on both sides. There is no way we can resume classes immediately.” In Uttargaya, teacher Madhav Lamichhane said: “We have been feeding about 450 students and residents with food bought under the school’s midday meal programme” (Kathmandu Post, 29 August; Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • The Nepal Red Cross Society, drawing on ICRC training, will provide restoring family links support and support for dead-body management (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).

None of the separation, exposure or school-damage figures we found is broken down by sex. We cannot say whether girls and boys are being separated, traced or reunified at different rates, or whether girls will return to school at the same rate as boys. Both are known divergence points after Nepali disasters, and both are being decided in the next few weeks. A national tracing capability exists inside the Nepal Red Cross Society and a municipal reunification effort is running in Bidur, and we found nothing showing them connected. Unaccompanied adolescent girls are the group for whom that gap converts into trafficking and exploitation risk, which the IFRC has committed to monitor.

Missing men, and the household composition the response will inherit

  • Nepal Police reported 28 police personnel out of contact and 15 customs employees unaccounted for, while about 60 people associated with the 20 MW Langtang Khola Hydropower Project were reported out of contact, including workers believed to be inside a tunnel (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August).
  • The IRDR names 4 exposed occupational groups whose workplaces sat inside the flood corridor: border police and customs staff at Timure and Rasuwagadhi, cross-border transport workers and traders, hydropower workers, and downstream riverside communities (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August).
  • In Nawalparasi East, men were the largest identified category among recovered bodies at 52 of 154, with 49 unsexed. Suman Gole, a 25-year-old excavator operator, returned to riverside quarters after an overnight shift and was swept away. Narayan Adhikari, a hydropower technician, disappeared with 5 colleagues (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).

Border policing, customs, hydropower construction and freight are heavily male occupations in Nepal, and all 4 sat inside a gorge with a 9-minute warning window. The economic benefit of border trade and hydropower distributes nationally. The physical risk concentrated on that workforce and the settlements around it.

If working-age male mortality is high, displaced and receiving populations may skew female, older and younger, with a sudden rise in newly female-headed households needing registration, cash, documentation and land succession support. Prepare that capacity now, but do not state it as fact, because 32% of the only sex-disaggregated sample could not be sexed and we found no sex composition for any occupational group.

Mobile women and girls: pilgrims, travellers and foreign nationals

  • The Nepal Tourism Board reported 384 tourists and travellers out of contact on the first day, comprising 291 foreign nationals and 93 Nepali nationals. IOM reported 826 missing on 27 August, of whom 579 were tourists. Project HOPE reported at least 1,400 missing including tourists from as many as 27 countries, many present for Janai Purnima or on pilgrimage to Mount Kailash (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August; IOM situation report 1, 27 August; Project HOPE situation report 1, 27 August).
  • The IRDR names tourists, pilgrims, transport workers and travellers as a distinct vulnerable group because mobile populations may have limited knowledge of local evacuation routes and hazards (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August).

We found no sex composition for missing travellers, the Kailash pilgrim cohort or Janai Purnima visitors, so we cannot establish the gender dimension. Pilgrimage traffic to Mount Kailash is seasonal, predictable and licensed, which makes the absence of pilgrim-specific evacuation briefing and headcount a planning failure rather than bad luck. Families of missing foreign nationals face identification and repatriation conducted in a language they may not read, through district administrations that have lost their records, with DNA matching expected to take 5 to 6 months. Women in those families carry most of the waiting and most of the claim paperwork, and we found no service addressing them.

Warnings reached people with a phone and literacy

  • The flood reached Rasuwagadhi around 9:00 a.m., Timure around 9:15 a.m. and Betrawati around 9:20 a.m., about 23 to 45 minutes after the breach. Warning time for border settlements was measured in minutes (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). Authorities sent SMS alerts as the threat emerged (Kathmandu Post, 28 August).
  • Cryosphere researcher Sunwi Maskey said: “Communities need to be prepared as well. They need to know where to run, which routes are safe, where elderly people and children should be taken. And where first aid or emergency supplies are located,” adding: “Unless we practice, we wouldn’t know” (Kathmandu Post, 28 August).
  • Channels now carrying critical information include SMS, Facebook, WeChat, the toll-free 1234 line, television screens showing photographs of recovered bodies, the police website, and loudspeakers on ambulances. Electricity and telephone networks are down across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading (IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August; IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).

Each channel requires a handset, a network or literacy. We found no data on the gender distribution of phone ownership, network access or literacy in these communities, so we cannot establish whether warnings and relief information are reaching women. A review of 8 Nepali climate change policy documents found formal commitments to gender inclusion were not operationalised (Rai and others, 2021). Work on flood early warning in Pakistan, used as regional analogy only, found people-centred design reaches women more reliably than technical dissemination alone (Shah and others, 2022).

The shelters sit below a new lake

A new lake formed by the collapse poses continuing risk of further landslides, mudslides and flash floods, with heavy rain forecast from 27 August, and the IRDR warns of unstable slopes and additional temporary river blockages even after the main wave passed (Project HOPE situation report 1, 27 August; IRDR rapid analysis, 26 August). Sources conflict on the source location and the seismic signal, and the scientists quoted declined to attribute this individual collapse to climate change.

Displaced people, including women late in pregnancy and people who cannot walk, are sheltering in neighbours’ houses and open spaces below an unstable new water body, and we found no camp or settlement relocation assessment against that upstream risk. A second evacuation from these sites would be run by the same women now running the municipal response, with the same 7 or 8 police officers.

Women are already running this response

This identifies the delivery channel that works.

  • The Nepal Red Cross Society has 343 paid staff and 89,863 volunteers through 7 provincial chapters, 77 district chapters and more than 1,500 sub-chapters, reached 341,000 people through disaster response and early recovery in 2024, and has chapters in the affected areas (IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, 27 August).
  • Chameli Gurung provides food and accommodation to around 750 people across 4 shelters from a municipality whose office and records no longer exist. Prabha Bogati convened the municipal disaster committee, is collecting loss data, led the reunification of more than 100 children, and communicates through Facebook. Sabita Aryal, deputy chair of Siddhalek, directs clearance of alternative routes and argues that vehicles carrying food, medicines and emergency services should go first. Anjana Tamang, a farmer at Chamabas, gave her banana harvest to a nearby old-age home, to rescue personnel and to stranded travellers. Prem Bahadur and Maiya Tamang, a couple with disabilities living mainly on small government allowances, turned their surviving hillside home into a shelter and have fed and housed more than 200 people (Kathmandu Post, 29 August; Kathmandu Post, 29 August; Kathmandu Post, National section).
  • Families are conducting their own searches. Umesh Syangbo and friends identified their relative Suman Gole after Nawalparasi residents recognised a chest tattoo from a police bulletin. The Kaski District Bar Association has provided volunteers to help families prepare claim petitions (Kathmandu Post, 29 August).
  • IOM is still weighing whether to work through the Nepal Red Cross Society, local civil society or direct implementation for shelter and non-food items (IOM situation report 1, 27 August).

4 female-led community structures already do work an incoming response may present as new.

  1. Female Community Health Volunteers, more than 50,000 nationally with a 35-year institutional history and unpaid workload as the documented constraint (Kharel and others, 2022; Tikkanen and others, 2024).
  2. Health Mother’s Groups, where advance notice of meetings and engagement with health staff help participation while unstructured meetings, agricultural work and Janajati caste membership limit it (Acharya and others, 2022).
  3. Participatory Learning and Action women’s groups, associated in rural Makwanpur with a 30% reduction in neonatal mortality and significantly fewer maternal deaths (Manandhar and others, 2004).
  4. Community loan funds initiated and managed by women’s groups (Morrison and others, 2010b).

No cluster owns participation. Women are specifying operational needs from inside destroyed municipalities while allocation is decided in rooms they do not sit in. The cost is registration criteria written without the people who know which households lost their papers, and distribution points sited without the people who know which women cannot reach them.

Recommendations

8 recommendations. Recommendations 1 to 4 are for this week. Recommendations 5 to 8 are for the next 14 days. Each is executable with resources already identified in the response.

1. Write an obstetric, newborn and paediatric priority rule into helicopter tasking

  • Actor. Nepali Army air operations as tasking authority, with the health cluster and the Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading chief district officers.
  • Action. Add obstetric, newborn and paediatric emergencies to the standing priority list for the 14 aircraft already deployed. Appoint 1 duty officer, reachable by satellite phone, who can task a flight without district-level escalation, and publish that number to Trishuli Hospital and every shelter. Return a midwife or skilled birth attendant with delivery and neonatal resuscitation supplies to Trishuli Hospital. Reserve a defined number of rotary-wing hours each day for medical evacuation, recorded separately from cargo and recovery flights.
  • Why. Helicopter evacuation is the only referral option for pregnant women and is not always available, and 1 woman in labour was airlifted only after repeated appeals. 14 aircraft are already flying, so the constraint is prioritisation under scarcity.
  • Budget line or decision seat. No new aircraft and no new budget. The health cluster tables the rule, the district disaster management committee minutes it, and the reserved hours appear as a standing line in the daily air tasking order.

2. Move unrestricted cash to women-led organisations

  • Actor. Any donor or agency holding unearmarked funds, disbursing through the Ministry of Health and Population Female Community Health Volunteer registry and the Nepal Red Cross Society district and sub-chapter structure already present in the affected areas.
  • Action. Transfer flat unrestricted grants with no application, budget template or competitive process, and require 1 page of retrospective reporting. Attach a per-day payment to volunteers, because unpaid workload is the documented constraint on both the volunteer cadre and Health Mother’s Group participation. Route the first tranche through women-managed community loan funds where they exist, because displaced people need cash before bank transfers can reach them.
  • Why. Kopila Pariyar has no money and nothing to buy, planned livelihood transfers move by bank transfer requiring documents that may have been swept away, and Nepal has more than 50,000 Female Community Health Volunteers who were first responders in 2015.
  • Budget line or decision seat. Unearmarked funds, the CHF 997,000 DREF allocation, or the CHF 7 million National Society fundraising component. The Ministry of Health and Population registry, the UN Women Nepal country office and the protection-cluster gender focal point should identify women-led organisations in the 3 districts within 7 days. We could not verify individual organisation names in Rasuwa, Nuwakot or Dhading, which reflects the limits of a remote review rather than an absence of such organisations.

3. Deliver water, sanitation and dignity items to dispersed households, and assess relocation against the new lake

  • Actor. Department of Water Supply and Sewerage with Nepal Army engineering units, Nepal Red Cross Society for last-mile distribution, and chief district officers for the relocation decision.
  • Action. Deliver bulk chlorinated water, household treatment supplies and the dignity kits, baby kits and sanitary materials already on the NDRRMA request list to displaced households staying with neighbours and in open spaces as well as to shelters. Install sex-separated lockable latrines with lighting and working drainage wherever more than 50 people are sheltering, sited where women judge them safe rather than where they are convenient to build. Produce a written assessment of whether current shelters and host settlements lie in the path of a surge from the new lake, and act on the rain forecast.
  • Why. Both piped water sources are destroyed, the medical superintendent warned publicly of possible epidemic from unsafe water and inadequate toilets, most displaced people are not in managed sites, and the gender-responsive items are on the government list with no delivery confirmed.
  • Budget line or decision seat. Government emergency allocation, including the NPR 10 million each released to Rasuwa and Nuwakot and NPR 5 million to Dhading, plus IFRC relief-phase funding. Minute the relocation assessment at the district disaster management committee so the decision has an owner.

4. Publish every figure by sex and age, and add disability, caste and ethnicity to registration

  • Actor. Nepal Police and the NDRRMA with the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix team for displacement data.
  • Action. Report deaths, missing people, injuries, displacement and affected households by sex and age band in every situation update, keeping unknown as an explicit line. Build sex, age, disability, caste and ethnicity fields into the Displacement Tracking Matrix Emergency Tracking assessment before it deploys. Publish separate counts by location of pregnant and lactating women, unaccompanied children by sex, older people, people with disabilities and female-headed households.
  • Why. We found no sex-disaggregated figure for this emergency, while the PDC has published an age split and Nepal Police already publish a sexed mortuary count, so the convention exists. IOM is still exploring deployment of Displacement Tracking Matrix tools, which is the moment to specify fields.
  • Budget line or decision seat. No new budget. This is a template change to the NDRRMA situation report, the shelter registration form and the Displacement Tracking Matrix questionnaire. The NDRRMA chief executive and the IOM Nepal information management lead hold the decisions.

5. Build a response-wide route for reporting exploitation, abuse and fraud that works without a phone

  • Actor. NDRRMA and the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens as owners, with the protection cluster, Nepal Red Cross Society community engagement and accountability function, and Nepal Police for deployment.
  • Action. Extend the toll-free 1234 line to accept reports of exploitation, abuse, fraud and violence. Place a female focal point physically in every shelter and host settlement receiving distributions, because a hotline fails where the network is down. Make the referral pathway to clinical care and psychosocial support documented and active before anyone collects data on these issues. Require every actor distributing aid, including private donors and volunteers, to sign a single code of conduct with a published complaint route. Increase police presence around Trishuli Hospital and surrounding settlements beyond the current 7 or 8 officers.
  • Why. IFRC will train its own volunteers, which safeguards 1 workforce rather than creating a route for an affected person. Armed men drove doctors from an operation, looting is happening in daylight, scam donation QR codes are circulating, and health system readiness to respond to gender-based violence was weak before this disaster.
  • Budget line or decision seat. Nepal Police operational budget for deployment. The focal points and referral pathway sit with the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens as a funded line in the government emergency allocation, tabled at the protection cluster.

6. Make compensation work for women who cannot prove a death, a house or a bank account

  • Actor. Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation with the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration, IFRC and Nepal Red Cross Society as detailed damage assessment partners, and the Nepal Bar Association building on the Kaski District Bar Association volunteer model.
  • Action. Issue an interim certificate of presumed loss that unlocks relief registration, cash transfers and shelter allocation without a death certificate. Write into the detailed damage assessment protocol that alternative evidence of household composition is acceptable where municipal records were destroyed, and that the NPR 500,000 mountain-house grant and the NPR 90,000 livelihood grant can be registered in a woman’s own name. Provide a documents desk at shelters and body-management centres that reissues identity papers and opens bank accounts. Connect Nepal Red Cross Society restoring family links capacity to the municipal reunification effort in Bidur.
  • Why. Grants are set per house and per household, transfers move by bank, records including Gosaikunda’s stamp and letterhead are destroyed, DNA matches will take 5 to 6 months, and Nepali research documents that most women depend on male relatives for land access.
  • Budget line or decision seat. Government emergency allocation for the desk. The interim certificate needs a ministerial or cabinet decision. The protocol change sits with detailed damage assessment design, which IFRC has offered to support, and must be settled before assessment begins.

7. Give Nepali women-led organisations decision-making seats in clusters and district committees

  • Actor. NDRRMA and the Ministry of Home Affairs, with IFRC and the Ministry of Urban Development for the shelter cluster, and chief district officers for district committees.
  • Action. Amend membership of the protection, shelter and camp coordination, health and early recovery clusters, and of district disaster management committees in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading, to include at least 2 seats for Nepali women-led organisations or federations with full rights on allocation and targeting. Do not assign observer status. Fill the seats within 14 days and publish who holds them. Reserve at least 1 seat for an organisation led by Tamang or other indigenous highland women.
  • Why. The cluster system is activated and its membership is being set now. We found no women-led organisation in the response architecture, while women including Chameli Gurung, Prabha Bogati and Sabita Aryal are running municipal response and specifying operational needs.
  • Budget line or decision seat. This recommendation is the decision seat. Its cost is a per-diem, travel and connectivity line for attendance, which must be funded rather than assumed as volunteer time, because telephone networks in the affected districts are down.

8. Commission a follow-up analysis co-authored with Nepali women-led organisations for 15 September 2026

  • Actor. UN Women Nepal country office or the protection-cluster gender focal point as commissioner, with Nepali women-led organisations as paid co-authors and co-owners.
  • Action. Contract Nepali women-led organisations at consultant-equivalent rates, not as informants, to collect primary data in the 3 districts. Let them populate the gender analysis matrix independently before any external synthesis, and hold joint authorship credit. Sequence the work to use the first Displacement Tracking Matrix results. Prioritise the questions this analysis could not answer: the sex composition of the dead, missing and displaced, the number and location of pregnant and lactating women, the status of Female Community Health Volunteers in affected units, whether girls and boys are separated and reunified at different rates, the reach of warnings and relief information by sex, caste and ethnicity disaggregation, and whether the one-door relief policy permits direct flexible funding to local actors.
  • Why. This analysis came from agency documents covering the first days plus published journalism.
  • Budget line or decision seat. Assessment and analysis line of the IFRC appeal, the IOM Regional Crisis Support Facility, or another instrument activated for this emergency. Sign the co-authorship contract before data collection begins so authorship is contractual rather than discretionary.

Limitations

We published this ahead of adequate evidence, judging that responders deciding things this week need an imperfect analysis now more than a complete one in October. No humanitarian agency, cluster or government body commissioned, reviewed or endorsed it. Read every finding against what follows.

Data basis

A remote secondary review, conducted in English in a single working session. Agency evidence comprises 5 documents covering 26 and 27 August 2026: the IRDR rapid analysis, IOM situation report 1, IFRC emergency appeal MDRNP022, Project HOPE situation report 1, and the PDC early impact analysis. All 5 describe themselves as preliminary. Field evidence for days 3 to 5 comes from Nepali journalism published between 26 and 30 August 2026, mainly the Kathmandu Post and Kantipur. Baseline evidence comes from peer-reviewed literature on Nepal published between 2007 and 2026.

We found no inter-agency needs assessment, gender analysis, protection assessment, Minimum Initial Service Package assessment or Displacement Tracking Matrix output for this emergency. Each may exist or be in production. We did not systematically search Nepali-language sources, cluster minutes, district records or organisational websites. Where this document says we could not find a figure or mechanism, that means it did not appear in the sources we reviewed. Treat every absence as provisional rather than confirmed.

Who was not consulted

This analysis contains no primary data.

Whose knowledge this rests on

Nepali researchers, journalists and officials produced the evidence. Basanta Raj Adhikari, Deepak Marahatta, Rita Thakuri, Sasmita Poudel, Suman Chapagain and Suraj Gautam wrote the IRDR rapid analysis through Nepali institutions within hours of the event. Kathmandu Post and Kantipur journalists, among them Subeksha Poudel, Ramesh Kumar Paudel, Nabin Paudel, Deepak Pariyar, Samjhana Rasaili, Sudeep Kaini, Poshnath Adhikari and Anil Giri, produced the field reporting and wrote most of the field evidence here. Nepali-language reporting reached us only where an English outlet translated or summarised it, so the evidence is filtered through what an English readership was judged to need. The officials and residents quoted did not consent to or shape this analysis. Their words appear exactly as published, and no paraphrase sits inside quotation marks.

Risk that visible actors are not representative

The women here appear because journalists reached them, which biases the sample toward elected officials, hospital staff and people near a working road or body-management centre. Rasuwa, where the disaster began, has the lowest body recovery count and the weakest communications, so the people worst affected are the least represented. Tamang and other indigenous highland women in Gosaikunda and Uttargaya are the group we are most likely to have misread. Many displaced people are staying in neighbours’ houses and open spaces, outside most counting systems we could see. The community structures we name as capacities are those in peer-reviewed literature, which favours structures international research programmes chose to study. Other local organising forms may be key to the response.

Framework mismatch

The frame uses the TGLF decolonial rapid gender analysis framework with IASC standards. Nobody tested them against Nepali or Tamang understandings of priority, loss or obligation. The recommendations use cluster-based logic because the cluster system is active, and that logic may reflect what international humanitarian audiences find legible rather than what affected communities value. Nepal’s response is constitutionally federal and routed through a one-door relief policy whose mechanism we could not verify.

Reflexivity

The TGLF Insights Team produced this remotely, with no presence in Nepal, no Nepali or Tamang language capacity and no relationship with any affected community. It carries an unexamined bias toward institutional, quantified and infrastructural evidence of the kind international humanitarian audiences find persuasive, and away from forms of knowledge and loss those audiences do not count. We also relied on documents produced by agencies seeking funding. Appeal documents describe intended activities in language that can read as delivered, so we label those activities as planned unless another source confirmed delivery.

Claims this analysis does not make

  • That gender-based violence is occurring, for which we found no evidence either way.
  • That sexual exploitation or abuse by responders is occurring, for which we found no evidence either way.
  • That trafficking is occurring, a risk that at least IFRC will monitor and for which we found no verified instance.
  • That more men or women died, which the single available sample cannot support.
  • That Dalit or Tamang households are over-represented among the displaced in any measured proportion, since the indication rests on naming and settlement patterns alone.
  • That the Kailash pilgrim cohort skews older or female, which is plausible but unevidenced.
  • That climate change caused this collapse, which the scientists quoted declined to assert.
  • That planned activities in appeal documents have been delivered.

References

Agency situation reports and appeals

News reporting

  • Giri, Anil. “Nepal brings new rules for foreign journalists covering Bhotekoshi flooding.” The Kathmandu Post, 29 August 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/nepal-brings-new-rules-for-foreign-journalists-covering-bhotekoshi-flooding
  • Kaini, Sudeep, and Poshnath Adhikari. “Washed-out bridges force flood-hit communities to rely on choppers.” The Kathmandu Post, 29 August 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/washed-out-bridges-force-flood-hit-communities-to-rely-on-choppers
  • The Kathmandu Post. “Flood survivors face a second crisis as medicines, water run short.” 29 August 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/flood-survivors-face-a-second-crisis-as-medicines-water-run-short
  • The Kathmandu Post. “Floods wipe out local governments’ ability to lead rescue, relief.” 29 August 2026. Incorporates reporting from Kantipur. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/floods-wipe-out-local-governments-ability-to-lead-rescue-relief
  • The Kathmandu Post. Money section index. Accessed 30 August 2026. Cited for the one-door relief policy, the approximately Rs20 billion available to the government from the current fiscal year, the Prithvi Highway supply disruption, and “Nearly 400 Kailash-bound pilgrims out of contact after Rasuwa flash flood.” https://kathmandupost.com/money
  • The Kathmandu Post. National section index. Accessed 30 August 2026. Cited for reported death and missing tolls attributed to the Prime Minister and Nepal Police, tunnel entrapment reporting, the disabled couple sheltering strangers, foreign rescue aid statements, the barrier lake warning, and the request to Meta and TikTok. https://kathmandupost.com/national
  • Paudel, Ramesh Kumar, Nabin Paudel, Deepak Pariyar, and Samjhana Rasaili. “Washed away bodies lead to problem of identification, morgue crunch.” The Kathmandu Post, 29 August 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/washed-away-bodies-lead-to-problem-of-identification-morgue-crunch
  • Poudel, Subeksha, with reporting by Daya Dudraj. “What triggered the Rasuwa flood? Scientists piece together a complex chain of events.” The Kathmandu Post, 28 August 2026, updated 29 August 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/28/what-triggered-the-rasuwa-flood-scientists-piece-together-a-complex-chain-of-events

Peer-reviewed and grey literature

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