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Abstract The application of machine translation (MT) in crisis settings is of increasing interest to humanitarian practitioners. We collaborated with industry and non-profit partners: (1) to develop and test the utility of an MT system trained specifically on crisis-related content in an under-resourced language combination (French-to-Swahili); and (2) to evaluate the extent to which speakers of both French and Swahili without post-editing experience could be mobilized to post-edit the output of this system effectively. Our small study carried out in Kenya found that our system performed well, provided useful output, and was positively evaluated by inexperienced post-editors. We use the study to discuss the feasibility of MT use in crisis settings for low-resource language combinations and make recommendations on data selection and domain consideration for future crisis-related MT development.