Towards digital Nepal: Enabling citizen scientists of remote districts to map their location
By Binod Prasad Parajuli and Sumit Vij
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[R]ecently, the locals of Budhiganga municipality of the district got trained recently to digitally map their resources, landmarks and upload them on the global open platforms called OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a global initiative to create a complete map contributed by the volunteers which are freely available for everyone to use in the future.
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Confident locals
Participants showed great enthusiasm to map their areas as the results were visible instantly online. The experts’ team had remotely mapped whole areas of Bajhang and Bajura beforehand. Some information from the remote map about two municipalities was validated by the participants who collected the field-based data. A total of 41 locals from the two districts participated in the training and made contributions to the validation.
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Information for resilience
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In cases of humanitarian emergencies, this information will be crucial as the information about key services including health posts, financial services, first aid, and the security forces are available online, for free. Also, if any humanitarian actors wish to use this information for planning any activities, these data can be very helpful. The community-mapped open spaces can also be used for evacuation, safe shelters and spots for landing helicopters during emergency situations.
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