Heifer Intl and FruitPunch AI: Nepal's Women Farmers Data System

Global development organization Heifer International has partnered with FruitPunch AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) for the social good community, to launch the AI for Women Farmers Challenge in Nepal. This new project aims to develop AI tools that can help women-led agricultural cooperatives in rural Nepal better leverage their data to improve livelihoods.

Specifically, the challenge will focus on using AI optical character recognition (OCR) models to extract, digitize and translate handwritten or typed text from paper records of Nepal’s women farmer co-ops. These records contain valuable data on finances, operations, livestock breeding, crop production, and more. However, paper storage makes this data difficult to access, analyze, and optimize to secure external financing, expansion opportunities, and participation in digital marketplaces.

Bridging this data gap through AI translation and structuring solutions represents a milestone for empowering women smallholder groups, according to Heifer International's Director Antoinette Marie. It boosts market availability, optimizes internal processes, and enables growth capital access for rural women entrepreneurs who organize local co-ops offering essential services to members.

The challenge unfolds across two 10-week technical collaboration sprints tapping AI experts from FruitPunch’s network. The first sprint develops advanced Nepali language OCR techniques to unlock paper record insights. The second model's data frameworks around specific use cases – like financial histories powering access to formal lending mechanisms. Participants gain coding skills while immediately enabling social impact for marginalized communities.

Heifer International has aided over 400,000 Nepali farmer families since 1997 via initiatives spanning agricultural training, sustainability consulting, and service platform development. However, persistent digitization barriers prevent cooperative groups from leveraging their operational data better. This new women farmer data challenge offers an innovative route to dissolve that barrier through appropriate AI skills training and hands-on applied technology assistance upholding Nepal’s agricultural base and achieving shared prosperity equitably and sustainably.

Agriculture data systems in Nepal

Based on available reports and information regarding agriculture data systems in Nepal, the situation seems to be at a developing stage with some key aspects as follows:

• Fragmented Data: Agricultural data in Nepal is highly fragmented across various ministries, departments, and research bodies with no unified national databases yet for land use, crop yields, inputs usage, etc. Data exchange and access mechanisms are limited.
• Manual Registers: While some digitization pilots exist, the majority of farms and rural co-operative records remain offline in manual crop-cutting experiment logs and pen-paper format limiting integration, forecasting, and wider usage.
• Biases: The agricultural census suffers from periodicity gaps lacks annual nationally representative sample surveys and relies more on land ownership-focused periodic surveys missing out tenant and subsistence farmers predominant in Nepal. Gender disaggregated farming data requires boosting through surveys to shape inclusive policies.
• Coverage Gaps: Remote mountainous and marginal areas regularly escape census/statistics data-gathering not captured in agricultural digital systems skewing policy insights. Expanding digital databases through roving surveys powered by mobile apps could help fill gaps.
• New Initiatives: Emerging Farmer ID card pilots, agriculture information management systems, and collaboration within South Asia around agro-informatics signal positive developments on the data infrastructure side. However significant public and donor investments are needed to upgrade and integrate systems if farm-level data gaps are to inform resilient climate-smart policy planning nationwide.

In summary, Nepal's agriculture data systems require substantial upgrades to unlock food security, productivity, and sustainability policy planning - an area impact investors and development partners can assist in navigating through best practice digital public infrastructure setup.

About Heifer International

Since 1944, Heifer International has worked with over 46 million people globally to combat hunger and poverty sustainably while protecting the environment.

Operating across 19 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including the USA, Heifer strengthens local food producers and farming communities through initiatives providing agricultural training, technical assistance, and sustainable development consulting - facilitating improved livelihoods, and food security infrastructure supporting equitable rural economies long term.

About FruitPunch AI

As a collaborative community leveraging AI towards sustainable development goals, FruitPunch AI partners with organizations facing social challenges that could be addressed via artificial intelligence solutions.

They onboard engineers from companies seeking practical AI skills training combined with domain experts from their global network into high-performance groups. Through intensive 10-week "AI for Good" sprints, they simultaneously apply cutting-edge techniques tackling defined humanitarian problems while accelerating digital upskilling certifying members technically as AI professionals committed to social impact.

The dual benefit allows delivering immediate real-world assistance using AI while expanding digital talent committed to ethically advancing economic empowerment, healthcare access, and environmental action benefiting underserved groups through scalable technologies customized to solving local needs.