MapAid urgently wants to support and boost the local economy, by working with our local partners, the Nepal Economic
Forum and the Kathmandu Living Labs, to make maps that clearly show how and where local industry and business is located
and where resources are limited. These maps will help identify where social enterprise providers — such as vocational
colleges, microfinance institutions and NGOs, are required, to help plug gaps in employment opportunities.
In summary, the goal of this project is to improve employment opportunities, by encouraging the
launch of small business start-ups and various support for existing small businesses. This means
business incubators of different types.
This project will not build and operate any business incubators. Instead, it will map where
small business incubators have been placed by different development agencies and policymakers,
and then compare this information to where the needs exist for new incubators, by considering
underlying populations. This will all be shown on maps that will be provided to the different
development agencies, so they can all see regions where there are gaps, and according to their
resources, be inspired to build new incubators or support existing incubators, in those areas.
In April 2015, Nepal suffered a devastating earthquake that killed over 8,000 people. This
followed the end of the decade-long civil war in 2006 which resulted in rural depopulation and
economic destruction, leading to youth migration to work in India and the Gulf states.
Therefore, MapAid urgently wants to support and boost the local economy, by working in reference
to our local partners and friends, including the Nepal Economic Forum and the Kathmandu Living
Labs, to make maps that clearly show how and where local industry and business is located and
where resources are limited. These maps will help identify where and how business
incubator providers have been operating — for example through vocational training colleges,
microfinance institutions and NGOs, all of which also helps policymakers.
Our local volunteer project manager is data scientist Lal Babu, who has been leading the survey
design and data collection and may be contacted via our MapAid Nepal Facebook page. If you would
like to be a data collector, and enter a fun competition for the best data collector, please
visit our Nepal Facebook page or click here. The prize for
the best data collector is a mobile phone.
What will your donation do?
When you donate it means we are able to support our unpaid volunteers to build better maps, like
our Nepal incubator map, and we are very grateful to you.
Do you want to partner with us ?
If you believe your organisation would benefit from our maps and would like to be a partner,
please get in touch.
