Weston charity's four tonnes of aid bound for Nepal floods

A charity registered in Weston-super-Mare has put four tonnes of emergency aid onto a charitable airlift to Kathmandu, for communities hit by the flooding and landslides in Nepal. That is 200 boxes of supplies on 10 pallets.

Shiva Charity UK told us it moved the boxes with Water Survival Box, the Rotary-founded charity that packs boxed emergency kit, and secured the flight through the aviation relief network Airlink. It has also donated £7,500 to Water Survival Box to support the response.

The scale is worth pausing on. The Charity Commission’s register records Shiva Charity UK as charity number 1045197, based in Weston-super-Mare, with a total income of £13,910 and expenditure of £20,473 in the year to 31 December 2025. It has six trustees and 15 volunteers, and its reporting is up to date. (Charity Commission register)

That is a very small organisation running an emergency airlift.

What the charity says it is doing

In a release sent to us on 3 September, the charity said the difficulty is not getting aid into Nepal but getting it to the people who need it most. Roads and bridges have gone, and mountain routes are treacherous after the monsoon rain.

It named three delivery partners on the ground:

• Community Development Centre Nepal
• JCI Kavre
• REACT, which the charity describes as a disaster-response organisation involving former British military personnel

Its own Nepal team is three people, named in the release as Pujan, Devraj and Ronee. Pujan, who has been visiting affected areas, is quoted in stark terms: “The smell of death in the valley was overwhelming.”

Tony Hobden, the charity’s chief executive, said: “This is an enormous disaster and the scale of the need is almost impossible to comprehend. Our priority is to move quickly, but also to make sure that aid gets to the right people. There is no point sending aid somewhere simply because it is accessible if the communities most in need are somewhere else.”

He said the charity has 31 years of experience in Nepal, including its response to the 2015 earthquake, but that this disaster is a different logistical problem.

“The mountain roads are incredibly difficult,” he said. “They are small, muddy and treacherous, and we are hearing of vehicles sliding off roads and down the mountainside. This is why working with people who know the terrain, the communities and the logistics is so important.”

The charity’s own appeal page says it is working with local partners in the Rasuwa region and central Nepal, and that the supplies going out include water, tarpaulins, clothes, solar panels and sanitary products. (Scoot 4 Nepal, emergency relief appeal)

The figures, and where they come from

The casualty numbers in this story are the charity’s, taken from its two releases, and we have not been able to verify them independently.

• Its release of 1 September cited reports of more than 950 people killed and more than 4,400 missing, with at least 69 schools destroyed or damaged and nearly 19,000 children affected
• Its release of 3 September put the death toll above 1,250, with more than 4,200 still missing

On the money, the 3 September release said the emergency appeal had raised around £27,000, including support from the trekking company Mountain Kingdoms. When we checked the JustGiving appeal page on 7 September it showed £17,570 from 345 online donations, so the charity’s total appears to include money raised outside that page.

The charity says no administration costs are being deducted from donations, and that money is going into the relief response with unavoidable direct costs such as local trucks, drivers and feeding volunteers.

The pink scooter, still happening

The emergency work is a diversion from what the charity had planned for this autumn. Hobden, who is 52 and describes himself as a scooter novice, intends to ride 1,000km across Nepal on a 125cc pink scooter from 9 to 19 November.

The ride, branded Scoot 4 Nepal, is raising money for reverse-osmosis water purification systems in rural schools. The campaign wants 50 of them, each with 10 years of servicing, at £1,500 a school, which is where the £80,000 target comes from. Its website showed £30,162 raised and 20 schools funded when we checked on 7 September.

“I’m not pretending that a tiny pink scooter is going to solve Nepal’s problems,” Hobden said in the earlier release. “But if I can ride 1,000 kilometres, raise money and help put clean water into 50 schools, then it’s absolutely worth doing.”

On the switch of focus, he said: “The scooter challenge is still happening, but right now Nepal needs us to respond to this disaster. We’ve spent 31 years working with people in Nepal. We know the country, we know the people and we have people on the ground. If we can use that experience to get help to communities that might otherwise be overlooked, that’s what we need to do.”

The register entry describes the same kind of work over a longer horizon: rebuilding a school destroyed in the 2015 earthquake, with five new classrooms, a toilet block and a drinking water filtration system, and sponsoring six children through their education there.

What it means for you

There are two separate appeals here, and it is easy to give to the wrong one by accident.

• Flood relief now: the emergency appeal is at justgiving.com/page/nepalfloods. This is the money buying tarpaulins, water and transport this month.
• School water systems: donations through scoot4nepal.org fund the purification units and their servicing, on a longer timescale.
• Businesses: the campaign is looking for corporate partners, and lists a contact at partners@scoot4nepal.org.

If you are checking any charity before giving, the Charity Commission register is the free public record of its number, trustees and accounts. Shiva Charity UK’s number is 1045197.

We have put questions to the charity in writing, including the exact route of the November ride, the scooter’s preparation, and a district-by-district account of what the aid has reached. It has also offered photographs of Hobden with the scooter. We will update this piece when those arrive.