When historic floods overwhelmed Rio in 2024, civil society mobilized quickly, but tech coordination lagged, and someone needed to step in.
In this episode, Dana Yaari speaks with Dr. Caroline Vanzellotti and Dr. Olimar Teixeira Borges of Bonanza, a Brazil-based NGO that helped lead the local response. They recount the early days in Porto Alegre, when the streets were submerged for weeks.
Dr. Caroline explains how their team used WhatsApp, Airtable, and monday.com to organize supply flows and reconnect entire communities. While Dr. Olimar walks through the tools they tested, the ones that failed, and the ones that scaled across future disasters.
You’ll learn:
Things to listen for:
(00:00) Welcome to Digital Humanitarian, Dr. Caroline Vanzellotti and Dr. Olimar Teixeira Borges
(01:25) Millions displaced and no data coordination in place
(03:21) Spontaneous shelters with no central tracking system
(04:39) Matching aid to actual needs in real time
(06:30) Why WhatsApp failed during early response
(08:27) Building dashboards from scratch with volunteer tech
(09:45) Shifting from shelters to community recovery
(11:32) Collecting household-level data post-flood
(14:13) Why disaster tech must be pre-positioned
(18:06) Scaling tools for multilingual, low-bandwidth regions
Resources:
