Mapping A Sustainable Future

How open data is helping Nepal to commercialize agriculture.

- Nirab Pudasaini

Agriculture is one of the most important livelihood sectors in Nepal. A substantial proportion of the rural income and employment opportunities for the Asian nation’s 210 million inhabitants come from farming. According to the 2014 World Bank report, agriculture contributed 235 billion NPR ($2 billion) to Nepal’s GDP — a whopping 34.35%. That’s not all. According to the National Sample Census of Agriculture Nepal 2011, the landlocked country has 3.8 million families involved in agriculture. And even though 83% of these families count on agriculture as their major source of income, the annual produce is not enough to feed even 60% of the families.

Ensuring effective agriculture production across the country has been a serious challenge due to high degree of spatial and temporal climate variability coupled with lack of agricultural datasets and technology. This is because many farmers use traditional practices in agriculture and there is a lack of commercialization in agriculture. Moreover, there is a lack of data on what is grown where. So, government and non-government organizations find it hard to plan changes that might prove effective. Also, the youth in Nepal today is disengaged with their community, and is looking to migrate to other countries for better opportunities.

Local knowledge and crowdsourcing

Enter Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) — a not-for-profit technology company working on open data and open source technology to solve day-to-day problems faced by citizens in Nepal. Believing that the local knowledge and crowdsourcing play a powerful role in any society, KLL thought that the best way to gather the requisite information was by engaging the farmers, students and teachers in the community.