Helping solve few problems in Nepal with Technology

I have been working on a research titled "Innovation Ecosystem for Development of Nepal" for past few months. Since, I started working on this research and after having gone through several literature, I have realized there is much more youths and individuals can do for Nepal than I earlier assumed.

I have been musing a lot over the ideas where technology, particularly ICT, could be used in improving the economic status of the country or living standard of marginalized group. There exists immense possibilities even the ones with great economic returns. However, here I am sharing two ideas from more of social entrepreneur perspective rather than business entrepreneur perspective. The ideas still need refinement where your inputs might help.

Build a portal with reasons and information to help people invest in Nepal. Something like http://www.investmentcommission.in/

• The portal can be used to highlight quality work being done and potential growth sectors
• Since the govt. support is unlikely to come (at least at the earlier stage), getting an endorsement by successful Nepalese with International branding like Prabal Gurung, Kiran Joshi and the Nepali diaspora will help
• It would be great if the site could be community owned and developed collaboratively on github or similar platform
• If ever, government agencies come forward, the ownership should be transferred to them
• I know many of us who are familiar with Nepal's present situation would be laughing at this idea and find it ludicrous. but believe me if we start to explore positive sides, we will definitely find some. We already have low wages, huge concentration of population in youth age-growth (see I found a few!). We don't necessarily have to eye for an investment from Google here today or a supply-chain business from Wal-mart. Nepal would begin growing even if we, say for example, manage to get car-seat cover factories (that is so trivial, isn't it but Nepal doesn't make them yet), electrical switch making companies, some hydro-power solutions.

Helping pregnant women get customized advice through mobile phone

• The idea is inspired (or you can say copied) from the following news story: http://www.iadb.org/news-releases/2010-08/english/pregnant-women-in-peru-will-improve-their-health-via-cell-phones--7708.html
• It can easily be implemented by a startup IT company in Kathmandu
• Would be a great service to do in a country where maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rates are very high
• The idea need to have major focus for rural areas
• Since reducing maternal and infant mortality rates are critical MDGs (Millenium Development Goal) for Nepal, getting some INGO to fund the cost shouldn't be difficult
• Can be easily done in partnership with a hospital
• This will be very useful as several rural women don't have access to hospital and the cases of teen age pregnancy are high
• The implementing organization can still make profit through SMS charges (though margin can be a bit low). However, I believe the social capital through such project would produce good returns in long run. And, moreover, it will help develop a market for SMS based services at the bottom of the pyramid (it is virtually non-existent in rural area at present and has great potential. One has to only connect to the kinds of services that would matter to rural population).

Although, I would like to work on these ideas, I am not quite sure if I would be able to work on either of them because of my other engagements. I would be more than happy to extend any help if someone wants to implement them.

FOSS Nepal wins best SFD '08 event for consecutive year

Today, it was a day of wonderful surprise for the FOSSians here.

The results of the best SFD (Software Freedom Day) events was announced and guess what we have managed to stand one of the best SFD events team for the second time in a row!

Thanks to the effort put by together by the collective effort of volunteers. Bibek Paudel ensured that our effort were properly logged in a report to be submitted. And here we are!!!

SFD announces three best SFD events team every year (in no particular order). The other two teams who managed to tell precisely how they managed the event were: SFD Nicaragua and DabaweGNU. The information is available at :

http://softwarefreedomday.org/Competition2008

FOSS Nepal was declared one of the best events even last year ('07) along with SFD Nicaragua and Beijing SFD.

SFD was celebrated throughout the world on September 20 this year. You can find a post about activities in this year's event in Nepal on Pravin Gautam's weblog

Everyone is enthralled and we will soon be having party to celebrate this victory!!! And, now that we have tasted the fruit of success, we are looking at making a hattrick. :)

A week long journey to hightech rural Nepal

It was unexpected but very pleasant surprise for me to receive a call from Basanta Dai (http://basantashrestha.blogspot.com) asking me if I could manage time to go to Nangi for follow-up training of PAN localization, a project by MPP (Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya: http://madanpuraskar.org/). I needed to teach the trainees about Blogging and CMS.

But then I was a bit hesitant since I needed to miss college for at least 10 days. I talked about this to Suraj, Manish and Shishir Dai. Everyone said that I should go. And so I was ready for a lifetime experience.

We started our journey from Kathmandu on Nov. 17 and had a night stay at Beni. The next morning we had to trek for 10 hours to reach our destination, Nangi. It has been the most difficult trek of my life till date but such a beautiful place is worth every pain.
The view of Annapurna South, Annapurna II, Dhaulagiri, Gurja Peak all make you feel like a heavenly creature.

While you trek, you wonder if you would even find salt at such a place, you will be amazed that most of the villagers use VOIP as the sole telephony medium. Most of them are good at emailing, chatting and you would find most of the communication in the neighbouring villages taking place through forum on a local webpage. What more, they have a tele-medicine centre.
I was really stunned to see this hightech village. And despite this all, they are so friendly to you.

The training was arranged by ENRD (E-Network Research and Development). Uttam Sir and Ambika Madam from ENRD accompanied us.

While Basanta Dai needed to discuss the new features in Nepalinux 3.0 like Text-to-speech, Nepali Sabdakosh, Nepali spell checker in Open office as well as GIMP, English/Nepali Wikipedia, Web Domain Registration, I was assigned the task of teaching Blogging and Website building using CMS. I chose Drupal (http://www.drupal.org).

From the next day, we had to start the training session. And, it was supposed to be a 9 day training session.

The trainees (or probably I say trainers since it was a Training of Trainers programme) were from 5 different locations namely: Krishna Sir, Kishan Sir and Boj Sir from Nangi (Myagdi), Sete Sir and Yamshree miss from Shikha (Myagdi), Narayan sir and Amrit ji from Tolka (Kaski), Shivaram Sir from Dandagaun (Rasuwa) and Chhanu Sir from Jhuwani (Chitwan).

In these 9 days, we got along very well with everyone and it was all fun inside and outside the class. We would take classes from 9.30 AM to 4.30 PM with an hour break and would then go for walk around village.What more, we also got to participate in the traditional Magar dance. I am glad that I got to experience all this.

In the meanwhile, Amar Sir from MPP joined us on training on 8th day while on his way to Ghorepani with his friends. We organized a small feedback session. And it was pretty good that we received good remarks about the training from the participants. Only the complaint that the participants had was that the curriculum in schools had to be Vendor independent so that they themselves had the opportunity to use Nepalinux regularly and teach their pupils. We assured that we would do the best we can. By the way, let me bring it to your notice that we are already putting the curriculum issue before CDC (Curriculum Development Committee) and I am taking charge on this front on behalf of FOSS-Nepal.

By the end of the training, the participants from the centers had developed the center's respectives sites. The following are the links to the sites:

Dandagaun -- http://dandagaun.com.np

Jhuwani -- http://jhuwani.com.np

Nangi -- http://nangi.com.np

Shikha -- http://shikha.com.np

Tolka -- http://tolka.com.np

Well, I have a lot to say, but let photos express it in a better way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitendra-pic/sets/72157609561027757/