Charity@Logwin
Giving Nepal the gift of a future
In April and May 2015, severe earthquakes struck Nepal, and the situation there is still critical today. In order to continue to help the local residents and particularly to improve young people’s prospects, Logwin has been working with the mechanical engineering company Voith and the Zukunft für Nepal Ostwürttemberg e.V. (“Future for Nepal East Württemberg Association”) to support the region for several years. The declared goal for this year was to build a training workshop including a small, fully functional hydropower plant.
Voith bought and collected heavy machinery from affiliated companies, refurbished the used parts, and is supporting the construction of the training workshop on site. The prefabricated house manufacturer Emil Elling from northern Germany provided the construction kit for the half-timbered building worth around half a million euros – because half-timbered buildings, especially when combined with clay, are considered extremely earthquake-resistant. Once the material was available, Logwin contributed its logistics expertise to the project: in a total of four 40-foot containers, the prefabricated building parts traveled from Hamburg to the Indian port city of Kolkata over the course of the summer. In addition, a flat rack construction container filled with machine parts and equipment headed in the same direction by ship from Italy. Logwin covered the shipping costs and provided services and labor amounting to a mid-five-figure sum.
By the end of August 2021, the entire cargo had arrived in Kolkata. From then on, representatives of the association and the mechanical engineering company took care of the final leg of the journey to the mountains, as well as the construction and operation of the much-needed buildings.
In order to improve the local residents’ living conditions, the stated goal for this year was to provide electricity and vocational training opportunities. In the future, young people can be trained as hydropower technicians at the hydropower plant and learn how to build furniture and earthquake-proof houses for their region themselves on the wood processing machines.
- April 25, 2015: Earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, felt as far away as China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
- April 26: Aftershock with a magnitude of 6.7
- Several aftershocks followed until mid-June 2015
- More than 8,700 people died in total, most of them in the region around Nepal’s capital Kathmandu. Over 22,000 people were injured
- These earthquakes are considered the deadliest disaster in Nepal’s history. According to official estimates, between 600,000 and 800,000 houses collapsed.
- The geological changes were so violent that Mount Everest is now proven to be three centimeters further to the southeast than it was in 2014.
As a logistics service provider, we move goods and merchandise along various shipping routes on a daily basis. And we also want to get things moving in society, because it’s important to us to take responsibility and, wherever we can, to improve the conditions of everyone involved. That’s why we develop and support charitable campaigns and aid projects around the world and are proud that our employees also show initiative here and get involved with these important issues outside of work.