Engaging Nepal’s youth with open data

To initiate discourse among Nepal’s youth and women’s organisations on the potential of open data for supporting their goals the D4D Program hosted a workshop to encourage their interaction with the agenda for growing supply and use of data.

Open data may be a relatively new concept, but it has the potential to impact and benefit a broad range of communities. To help take the open data discourse beyond the tech community and build the potential for open data to be harnessed by broader stakeholders the D4D Program has, among others, targeted organisations that focus on empowering youth and women.

In December 2017 the D4D Program hosted a workshop to introduce the concepts of open data and identify the role that youth and women-focussed organisations could play in driving the open data agenda. The workshop, entitled ‘Have your say: Is data for you?’ gave these groups practical experience of working with data to help them better understand its value. Through this exercise, it became apparent that although data is available in Nepal, the lack of clear information on where to find that data is a significant barrier to use. Workshop participants expressed a need for support to help build their individual and organizational capacity on open data, an interest in mapping one another’s expertise to encourage collaborations, and the need for a platform that enables them to share data they collect or share their experiences and expertise. The D4D Program will continue to explore ways in which it can help address these challenges and support these communities to benefit from open data.