GSMA handed over the award to Ncell and Flowminder on Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Rajesh Lal Nyachhon of Ncell, along with Linus Bengtsson and Erik Wetter of Flowminder, received the award.
"Our congratulations to all of the winners and nominees of the GSMA's Glomo Awards this week of Mobile World Congress," Michael O'Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA, said. "In what was a remarkably wide field of more than 930 entrants, narrowed to 170 nominees, it is truly an outstanding achievement to have been selected by our esteemed judging panels."
The award means the initiative has been recognized as outstanding efforts, which demonstrate how mobile technology can be used in emergency or humanitarian situations.
Ncell had provided anonymized network data to Swedish research foundation -- Flowminder, which then generated information on people displacement in the wake of the disaster. This information was part of a regular UN update to aid organizations and was critical in ensuring that relief efforts were directed to the right regions.
The updates helped relief agencies better manage logistics to cater to the relief needs such as food, water, medicines and shelter. It also helped understand the need for post-earthquake rehabilitation and reconstruction, and learn the effect of people migration during such crisis.
"The initiative received great response from the humanitarian aid community to channelize support effectively after the earthquake last year," Erim Taylanlar, CEO of Ncell, said. "GSMA Global Mobile Awards is, indeed, an important achievement. We have been able to demonstrate with example how mobile companies can play important role in disaster response."
Although there has been use of mobile phone data in the past to measure population movement, this was the first time the method was adopted to track movement in an ongoing 'live' situation, helping understand where the people are and channelize the rescue and relief efforts accordingly, making the works more efficient.
The initiative showed that two weeks after the quake an extra 500,000 people left the Kathmandu Valley. Most of them went to the surrounding districts and the Tarai area in the south and southeast of the country. On a wider scale, across the country an estimated 1.8 million people had left their home districts.
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