Three weeks of counting confirms 800 houses, and closes the Sipapokhare project
- Published
- Reading time
- 2 min
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- MRN
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- Reconstruction
Most organisations close a construction programme by adding up their own invoices. Mission Rebuild Nepal closed this one by sending someone to count the buildings.
Dr Dikshanta Prasai, a board member based in Nepal, spent three weeks in Sipapokhare VDC in Sindhupalchowk walking all nine wards and counting every house, photographing each ward as he went. The terrain is steep and the settlements are scattered across terraces; the organisation described the task, accurately, as daunting.
The count returned 800 completed houses, with a further five to ten in a semi-finished state. On the strength of it, the organisation stated that it was now completely confident in the figure, declared the Sipapokhare Rebuilding Project concluded, and said it would move on to building schools and a community hall.
The audit also produced an admission. Around five donors' names were missing from the plaques fixed to the houses they had paid for, and the organisation said so in the same post, with an apology and an undertaking to add them. Each transition home carries a plaque naming its donor; a missing plaque is a small failure, but it is the kind that a self-reported completion figure would never have surfaced.
A month earlier the organisation had filed its 2016 federal tax return and published the link. The verification and the filing were presented together as one exercise: the accounts said what had been spent, and the count said what had been built.
