Food Security Nepal Project #51574

Support 200 Nepalese farmers to become food secure

by Engineers Without Borders Ireland

Project Report | Mar 12, 2024
Biochar Kiln Project Update March 2024

By Cristina Garcia Santos | EWB Program Manager

We bring you some exciting project updates! As we shared in our previous reports, the project is currently in its user evaluation stage. Our partner in Nepal has recently spent some weeks in the US attending the Global FEWture Alliance events at the University of Maryland, a program our Biochar project is part of. Global FEWture Alliance is an international alliance based at the University of Maryland that seeks to alleviate food, water, and energy insecurity, protect environmental and global public health and bolster community resilience in a changing climate.

Last week, we had a meeting with our partners in Nepal to discuss the project’s next steps. The partnership is a combination of local partners including Sanskriti Farms and Kathmandu University, together with the support of EWB Ireland as well as technical support from Technological University Dublin. We will develop three main packages for this next stage. The first work package will be to conduct a social survey to collect data about the biochar and the kilns from farmers as well as their insights on use and design. This will be conducted by a Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) survey we have already developed and sent to our partners for review and translation. We have decided to use Microsoft Access as the most suitable tool to conduct the survey and collect the data. The information collected will also shed light on whether farmers consider there is an added value in investing in the biochar kiln to help us assess the viability of creating a sustainable local social enterprise.

The other two work packages will focus on scientific testing and field trials. The characterisation and soil testing will be conducted at Kathmandu University. The field trials will be conducted on our partner’s farm to analyse crop size and quality. The focus of these will be to investigate creating a sustainable food security program also supporting tourism initiatives in the local communities.

For the next few weeks, our partners are working on further developing these three work packages and a detailed budget plan to apply for the funding provided by the Global FEWture Alliance program to conduct the evaluation stage of the project.

We hope to bring more exciting news for our next report. Thank you for supporting our project!

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Nov 20, 2023
Biochar Kiln Project Update November 2023

By Cristina Garcia Santos | EWB Program Manager

As we mentioned in our latest report from July, the project has entered a data-gathering phase that will take six months. This entails many aspects that need to be considered carefully before we engage in a community participatory process with users of the biokilns to assess the effectiveness of the product as well as to collect farmers’ insights on use and design, among other aspects. During the first three months, we have been working on our Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) survey, which is the method we have decided to use to collect our data. It aims to analyse what is known (knowledge), believed (attitude), and done (practised) in a certain context or project. The survey has already been sent to our partners in Nepal for review and to start translating it into Nepali. We are also discussing which is the best way to collect the data offline and make it accessible to the farmers.

We have also started, together with our partners, to work on the Ethical Review Approval Process required by the Nepal Health Research Council. Ethics approvals are part of any community engagement practice in Nepal; hence in the next three months of the project, we will work on obtaining the appropriate authorizations before we collect the data and analyse the results.

During the summer, we sent new spiral pumps that pump water and air. It is a low-power rainwater/greywater recycling system that aerates and cleans wastewater and pumps it back to roof level. This hand pump does not need maintenance, as it operates without valves or seals. We will provide more information about the pumps and how users are utilising them shortly.

By our next report, we hope to bring you more updates about the evaluation phase of the project. Thanks for your support and for helping us get to this stage!

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Jul 10, 2023
Biochar Kiln Project Update July 2023

By Cristina Garcia Santos | EWB Consultant

Work does not cease since our last update as we move on to the project’s next steps: data collection and analysis of results. This next phase aims to collect users’ feedback on the biochar kiln’s effectiveness, learn more about how it operates, how the farmers use it, and whether this use corresponds to the project’s main objective. We also expect to gather more information about users’ needs and any improvements that might be necessary to undertake.

Collecting data in the field entails thorough planning on what information you need to gather from users, what methodology is best, and how to collect the data offline. For this purpose, we have decided to use a KAP survey to collect the data needed for the project. KAP stands for knowledge, attitudes, and practices. This type of survey provides access to qualitative and quantitative data through predefined questions designed for a standardised questionnaire. It aims to elicit what is known (knowledge), believed (attitude), and done (practised) in the context of the topic of interest. For this project, the KAP survey will help us assess the farmer’s knowledge regarding the biochar kiln and compare it to what they believe and the use they make of it.

We are currently working on drafting the survey, a key step as we have to consider all the information needed to assess the project’s viability, among other aspects. We are in direct contact with the Nepal team through meetings and emails to gather all the previous data and reports they have on the project. This information is an essential starting point for the survey, as it allows us to analyse the background data we already have and, most importantly, identify the data we need to collect. Once the survey is ready, it will be translated, and data will be gathered thanks to our partners in Nepal.

After collecting the data, the next step will be to analyse it and report the results. This will help us draw the project’s next steps. Together with our partners, we will consider the feasibility of a wider-scale project and the biochar’s other potential uses, such as indoor heating source or cooking utility.

We hope to bring you exciting news on our next project update in November. Enjoy the summer days - thanks for helping us get to this stage!

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