Digital Humanitarian

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:
  • How Bonanza tracked shelter inventory using dashboards
  • Why training local volunteers helped speed up adoption
  • What it takes to adapt a digital system after the storm ends

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:

What is Digital Humanitarian ?

Disaster response is at a turning point. Traditional humanitarian tools - paper logs, slow coordination, limited scalability - can’t keep up with the growing scale and pace of global crises.

And as political instability reduces available resources, it's more critical than ever to adopt bold, technology-driven solutions.

Digital Humanitarian takes you to the front lines of disaster relief, where innovation isn't optional - it's saving time, resources, and lives.