Care Nepal

CARE is a leading humanitarian organization committed to saving lives and fighting poverty and social injustice. Working alongside a vast network of partners globally, CARE works to rebuild and improve lives of the most disadvantaged, poor and vulnerable communities. Through community based efforts, CARE works to prevent spread of diseases, increase improved health awareness and access to safe drinking water and sanitation, build awareness and bring communities together to expand economic opportunities as well as access to natural resources while protecting the environment.

CARE seeks to influence policies and challenge social norms that affect the lives of women, children and the most vulnerable communities through strong networking of partners, advocacy and awareness on gender and women’s rights, leadership campaigns and skills training. CARE also works actively in emergencies by providing aid to survivors of war and natural disasters. CARE partners with a range of stakeholders, including local NGOs and other civil society organizations, social movement, government agencies, research and academic institutions, private sector and donors to support the most vulnerable communities and populations.
The Challenges
The pandemic has severely affected the poor, vulnerable, and socially excluded communities working in formal and informal sectors especially landless, daily wage earners, migrant returnees, and unskilled labourers are at the pressure from both ends – infection risks and financial impacts.The prolonged lockdown, and reduced access to income generation, combined with the likely depletion of savings can put further pressure on coping capacity of these households and their ability to access basic needs. Further this pandemic has restrained vulnerable populations’ access to market information, and agricultural inputs supply and output market actors. Due to the disruption of the market system, vulnerable households are not getting fair prices for their production, leading to their reduced income. On the other hand, smallholder producers have made losses in production. They need real time market information and virtual access to the market to keep their earnings prospects alive and meet essential needs. In a limited/restricted mobility context due to pandemic, digital platforms are only the solution to connect small holder farmers with the market for production, inputs and marketing of products at reasonable price.
The Solutions

In response to the restrictions on the movement of people and agricultural products, CARE Nepal has come with its intervention of ICT4D initiatives in collaboration with the Federation of Nepal Cottage and Small Industry (FNCSI), National Farmers Group Federation (NFGF), Bheri Environment and Excellence (BEE) Group, Local Cooperatives in Banke district to serve vulnerable population through providing viable digital solution. Under ICT4D initiatives CARE partners with RUMSAN for developing, setting up and operation of digital platforms named ‘Krishipath’ in the form of web and mobile based software applications.

‘Krishipath 'has been designed as a one-stop digital solution for agriculture knowledge, inputs, services, information and market. It is also a vehicle for disseminating agromet advisory services and information related to climate smart agricultural models, approaches and practices among farmers. ‘Krishipath app includes interactive features through which producers get access to the market and can connect with respective experts for solution to problems related to production and climate smart agricultural (CSA) practice.

Through KrishiPath platform one can also visualize all of the activities and data related to the number of transactions, categories of different fruits and vegetables, distributions channel in charts, interactive reports, graphs, and other representations to assist farmers and other users to develop and analyze the powerful insights quickly and effectively.

Rumsan Associates developed the web-based mobile responsive application where:

  • Admins can use the dashboard to view multiple reports generated by the system based on region and forecast what is in demand in the market.
  • Add products on the basis of their knowledge and information on how to cultivate crops.
  • Add a meteorological report for the farmers so that they can take necessary action depending on the weather conditions.
  • Manages users of the application: farmers, traders, agro service providers, organization users and admin.
  • View all the list of products uploaded in the system by the mobile users (farmers and service providers).
  • View all the orders of the products, completed, cancelled and ongoing transaction.
  • Add organization and users according to their respective organizations.
  • Get users feedback from the mobile application.
  • Export Report in excel spreadsheet.
Technology
  • Database : MongoDB
  • UI : CSS/Javascript with material UI framework
  • Programming Language : JavaScript, React Native (Mobile Application)
  • Server : NodeJS
  • UI : CSS/Javascript with Bootstrap