Nepal

The World Bank and GFDRR started working in partnership with the Government of Nepal in 2012. The aim was to better understand seismic risk in order to build resilience in the education and health infrastructure of Kathmandu Valley.

DATA SHARING PLATFORM
COUNTERPARTS
http://drm.moha.gov.np/
Department of Education, Nepal Risk Reduction Consortium, NSET, Kathmandu Living Lab
NUMBER OF SCHOOLS MAPPED2,256buildings
NUMBER OF HEALTH FACILITIES MAPPED350buildings

Understanding Nepal’s Risks

In 2013, Kathmandu was chosen as a pilot city for OpenDRI. This was in part because the population faces the highest mortality threat from earthquakes of any urban population in the world.

Sharing Data

The Open Data for Resilience Initiative supports a data sharing GeoNode for DRM efforts in Nepal. The World Bank and GFDRR started working in partnership with the Government of Nepal in 2012. The aim was to better understand seismic risk in order to build resilience in the education and health infrastructure of Kathmandu Valley. The first step of this process was the creation of a disaster risk model to determine relative vulnerability of the buildings in which such facilities were housed. As this has been completed the next phase is for this model to be used to prioritize plans for subsequent building retrofits. In November 2012, OpenDRI facilitated training and awareness raising on OpenStreetmap to a range of community groups, particularly universities and start-up clubs. Along with this, the Kathmandu Living Lab (KLL) was started in 2013 as an Open Cities investment project to support this work. It initially comprised of participants from the first phase of trainings after building relationships between the local technology community, government, NGOs and international organizations. The team of dedicated mappers creates and implements both mobile and internet-based technology solutions to enhance urban resilience and civic engagement in Nepal. KLL is working to “localize successful models of open government and civic innovation to improve urban planning and management”. It is also working to build partnerships with local and international organizations to improve open data in Nepal. These mappers played a critical role in data collection, monitoring and sharing in the aftermath and recovery of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes engaging crowdsourced assistance from across the globe. More information is available at http://kathmandulivinglabs.org.

Collecting Data in Nepal

Under the project, teams from the World Bank assembled partners and community mobilizers to help execute the largest regional community-mapping project to date. The core mapping team expanded from 4 to 6 people along with 6 part-time interns from Kathmandu University and 11 volunteers from Tribhuvan University. Over 2,300 individuals participated in OSM trainings or presentations during the first year of the project. The project surveyed more than 2,250 schools and 350 health facilities, along with road networks, points of interest, and digitized building footprints – representing nearly 340,000 individual data nodes to be incoproated into a number of disaster preparedness planning exercises and transportation planning applications.