I have already written about Foodathon in a previous blog post. The opening ceremony was held on 13th June, 2020. It was such a great pleasure to speak in line with personalities like Formal Minister Ganesh Shah, MD of Nimbus Mr. Ananda Bagaria, Advisor of UN Habitat Bhusan Tuladhar, CEO of TFF Christine Gould, Chairperson of R&D Innovation Mrs. Sunita Nhemaphki, Chairman of BITS Ladder Shailendra Jha and National Head for Business Development AIESEC Nepal Sadikshya Karki. I was very much nervous as well as pretty excited for speaking in such an event. I had already wrote the concept note of the event and as a designer of the event, I had full confidence on me for y part. I had no such time to prepare special speech for the event as I had to do other tasks of the event. However, I managed to speak whatever came to my mind at the moment. I am writing a transcript of it here.
Honourable Former Minister Ganesh Shah ji, Respected Anand Dai, Bhusan Dai, Shailendra Dai, Sunita Mam, our valued partners, energetic participants and audience.
I would like to welcome all of you to this beautiful Saturday morning and first of all I would like to congratulate all the finalists and huge gratitude towards them for showing the sense of agency to solve the looming food crisis in Nepal.
Lockdown is near to the end but I would like to talk about during the start of the lockdown. At the start of the lockdown there were four different group of people.
First group of people were those whose posted their breakfast, their lunch, their dinner to Facebook and Instagram, the same group of people shared the videos of recepies of food from Youtube.
Second group of people were those who were returning back to their villages. They were walking hundreds of kilometers tired, thirsty and hungry.
Third group of people were those who were confined in their homes. They did not have access to food as food supply chain was disturbed as well as the food prices were rising.
Fourth group of people were those who had lost their jobs. Lot of people were returning back from the middle east and Gulf countries. These young people had the energy but they lacked opportunities.
Let’s talk about the facts. We imported vegetables worth Rs. 4 billion during the start of lockdown, while vegetables being produced at some part of the country was being wasted, dumped and decayed. Nepal has 30 lakh hectares of fertile land and 38 lakh families are engaged in Agriculture. Nepal is an agricultural country. We are farmers, by default. Still we rely on imports? Still access to food is denied? Still people dying hungry?
Food is security, Food is equalizer, Food is a language through which society reveals itself and how it transfers it to the future generation. But here is a problem, here is a gap . A gap between high income families and low income families, a gap between produces and consumers, a gap between youth and opportunities. This is what we do at BITS Ladder, bridging the gap. At BITS Ladder we empower youths to solve contextual problems through innovation, education, training and networking.
We have tried to bridge the gap between youth and opportunities to find coherent and robust solution to our food production, supply and storage not only during the crisis but also after the crisis. We are not alone in this. We have partnered with 33 organizations to find sustainable solutions for food security.
BITS Ladder as an organizer, we have Thought for Food as Knowledge Partner who is helping us by providing mentors and shaping our criteria. For all these wonderful designs, we have Upsarga Technologies as branding partner, for the online host for this event, we have Micrososft. Khalti, our payment partner is looking after all the digital payment solutions. Our mentorship partners will provide 6 months long mentorship to the winning team, They are Hasera, Utopia, Green Growth, Aero Roots, Antarprerana and King’s College. Our outreach partners helped us to reach our target of 10000+ youths which are EnB, CSITAN, ITS Nepal, Youth Opportunities, Youth Can, EYOSA, Stay in Farm, Sustainability week Kathmandu, AIESEC and Jobs Sniper. Our media partners Living with ICT, Krishi Today, Krishak ra Prabidhi, Halokhabar and ICT Byte helped us to spread the news. Our supporters helped us in many ways which were Mr. Butcher, Story Cycle, Gandaki Urja, Order Sathi, Windpower Nepal, TFNAA and CIM.
I would like to welcome all of you again to this wonderful event and hope we find sustainable solutions to solve the looming food crisis. A hungry individual can’t build a nation.
Thanks.
