When everything is gone, where do families start again?

When the Bhotekoshi River flash-flooded on the morning of August 26 , families mainly in Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts had little time to run and no time to save anything. Homes, livestock, land documents, bank cheques and ATM cards, and life savings kept in cash at home were gone within minutes.

So far over 1,300 lives have been confirmed lost, thousands remain missing, and more than 17,000 children are now in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The immediate story, the one filling the news bulletins, is one of rescue and grief. But another crisis is already beginning, and it will unfold over the coming months largely out of the headlines: a household-level financial crisis, in which families with no savings, no insurance, and no documentation to prove what they owned are left to rebuild their lives with nothing to rebuild them on.