Two years ago the first of several devastating earthquakes hit Nepal, killing over 9,000 people and destroying almost a million homes.

Today, exactly 2 years later, barely 5% of the destroyed houses have been rebuilt. Hundreds of thousands of people still struggle to get by in temporary housing, many without clean water or any public services.

Since the day after the first earthquake, we’ve been running Citizen Helpdesks in the worst affected areas, deploying hundreds of community volunteers to monitor and improve the earthquake response and close the loop on accountability problems.

And it’s working. To date we’ve reached over 70,000 people in 800 villages, solving thousands of problems and improving countless lives. We are creating trust that provides the basis for recovery to work.

Our volunteers and staff have done everything from helping survivors get the compensation they’ve been promised, to lobbying government officials to fix problems, to providing critical information to coordinate donor relief efforts. Watch a short video below to learn more, and hear the words of Sunita, a survivor.

You can read more about ongoing reconstruction challenges in this Al Jazeera article by Nepal Country Representative, Narayan Adhikari.

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