The question is quite unclear here. Are we talking about temporary houses to live or the kind of houses which are supposed to be sustainable and residential. Better house construction techniques are sure to help and earthquake resistant building techniques are known and applied during current construction of houses in Nepal, I suppose.
I am not the authority here though. Just clearing the confusion in the question.
I stumbled upon this essay by Norvig about one and half year earlier when I was just searching web as a newbie wannabe programmer and this essay really cleared my view about programming. I am still a student and have not yet seriously got into programming but the essay has encouraged me to be more persistent.
P.S. I am also from Nepal.