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General Country Information:
Formerly part of British India, Bangladesh was first known as East Pakistan until its independence in 1971. Since then, the government has seen several military coups up until 1991, when democratic elections were introduced. Save for the military backed regime in 2007 (in order to find and rid the country of corruption), Bangladesh has grown more stable each year since independence. Their economy has been growing at a decent pace and progress in food security has been substantial.
Situated between Burma and India in Southern Asia, Bangladesh is a largely flat country with a mostly tropical climate. The country also experiences monsoons for several months of the year and due to its location on large river deltas (the Ganges and Brahmaputra, for example), the country is often inundated. This factors into the troubles involving food security as roughly 70% of the land is used agriculturally. Waterborne diseases also pose a great risk to the rural population.
Speaking of, the total population is somewhat less than 170 million and a vast majority of its citizens are ethnically Bengali. The dominant religion of the region is Islam, with Hinduism a distant second. Overall, the population is fairly young with a median age of about 25. Additionally, the urban population hovers around 30% of the total. Of course, it would follow that most people are involved in Bangladesh’s largest industry, agriculture.
References: The World Factbook, CIA
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bg.html
Ryan Jost
Sparking the interest of the USAID
The USAID is interested in Bangladesh because it “is one of the most densely populated and climate change-vulnerable countries in the world.” (pg 1) Bangladesh has finally become self-sufficient on rice production. The USAID is interested in lessening death rates and increasing literacy in the population. Due to the help of the USAID in the last 26 years, the population “mortality has declined by two-thirds and female literacy has doubled.”
The USAID is helping the mortality rate by decreasing population of people living in poverty and food security. They are doing this by helping Bangladesh increase their farming efficiency with new fertilizer, better plants, and newer technology. On the same note, they are increasing the use of properly eating and getting the needed nutrition levels for living a healthy life. For the people that are highly effected by climate, the USAID is helping them find jobs so that the people are less relying on natural resources that can be effected by the climate change. Also, the USAID is helping reduce human-tarrficing, child marriages, home violence, and building local managements to increase working conditions.
Emily Glaeser
Sources:
https://www.usaid.gov/bangladesh
https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1861/Bangladesh_Country_Profile_2016.pdf
https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1860/Bangladesh_CDCS.pdf
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/videos/less-fertilizer-equals-more-rice-more-money-bangladesh
State of the Map:
Bangladesh has proved to be a difficult area to map. Some of the challenges we have run into are the complex waterway system, thick greenery, and poor image quality. To overcome some of these issues, we are using custom imagery from the Image Geo Center, using side-by-side Google Maps, and consulting with peers from Bangladesh. Urban areas are very dense. Buildings are compacted together into small areas. Buildings are made from a variety of materials so, there is no uniform look when identifying buildings. Rural areas are dominated by farm land, waterways, and unclassified roads. A complex water system is further complicated by the addition of man-made ponds and irrigation ditches. Most all properties have at least one pond and foot paths along their crops. Foot paths can easily be mistaken with unclassified roads. There are four categories for pathway line features and four different types of water features using both area and lines. Clouds and image stitching are unavoidable but do play a roll in mapping ability. It is also important to note that Bangladesh has a monsoon season where intense rain fall completely alters the look of the map. The images we are working from are during the dry season and taken on January 2014.(GeoCruizer, n.d.)
There has been some mapping done in the past by other remote contributors and edits done by locals. Most of the project area is still blank. The major highways and rivers have been mapped. When looking at other HotOSM projects there is significantly more being done with more urgency. In 2010, the first Bangladesh mapping community was started. A group of computer science and engineering students from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) mapped their campus. By 2011 only 1% of the country had been mapped, with most of it along the capital and port cities. The mapping community of Bangladesh has a unique set of challenges compared to neighboring India. (Sohaila, 2011)
The Challenges and Prospect of OpenStreetMap inBangladesh:
V. CHALLENGES
The challenges we face in Bangladesh has its own type and distinguished than the difficulties one may face in developed countries. There are several strong reasons behind this, some of which are listed below:
1) There are very few GPS devices used actively in Bangladesh. Very few people own a GPS device, because of its cost.
2) There is a lack of technically skilled volunteers for OpenStreetMap contribution. The lack of volunteers is the principle reason behind the the slow progress of OSM in Bangladesh.
3) Contribution in OpenStreetMap requires a moderately high speed internet connection, which is quite costly in Bangladesh. Most of the people use low-cost internet packages which suffice for browsing, but not good enough for viewing or editing OpenStreetMap quickly.
4) The concept of digital map is very new in Bangladesh and so people are not used to consult maps for their daily needs. They do not consider a map as an important gadget yet. This reluctance is also making the progress of OpenStreetMap slow.
5) 3G mobile phone technology has not been introduced to Bangladesh till mid 2011. So, the location based services are not provided by the telecom operators.
6) Software firms in Bangladesh mostly use the map services from Google and Yahoo for application development rather than making their own products. Under this situation, OpenStreetMap lags behind.
7) The Government of Bangladesh has not taken any imitative to promote open source development. All the actions on OpenStreetMap have been carried out by individuals or small groups.
8) OpenStreetMap can also be a great field of research for the academia. It can be used for surveying, data collection and many other ways. But in Bangladesh, the researchers apart from computer science background are mostly unaware about the usage of OpenStreetMap.
A comparison between Bangladesh and a neighboring country India can clearly indicate the situation. In the OpenStreetMap GPS traces database, there are only 25 entries from Bangladesh [9], where India has 531 [10]. The comparison was done using the number of search results found by using the country names as search tags.
Sohaila Binte Ridwan, H. S. (2011). The Challenges and Prospect of OpenStreetMap in Bangladesh. Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT 2011) 22-24 December, 2011, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
GeoCruizer. (n.d.). #934 - Khulna Northeast - GWU & USAID Mapping Exercise (Area 2). Retrieved from Hot Task Manager: http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/934
Jaime McLaurin
Bangladesh has wide spread unmapped areas making it difficult to create resilience towards food security improvement, transportation, economic growth and nutrition to address hunger and end poverty.
Many countries worldwide deal with these same issues at different levels along with other issues such as flooding and the rate of first respondents. By improving the areas of which are unmapped, map data collection can help create resilience in all of these places.
Lack of Food Security in Bangladesh is the result of many factors such as climate change, including scarce water resources, rising sea level, vulnerability to extreme shocks, and changing weather patterns. Population growth, urbanization, and soil and natural resource depletion have led to degradation of Bangladesh’s land, water bodies, wetlands, and forests and pose a significant threat to the agriculture sector.
Without food security Bangladesh runs the risks of poverty, lack of access to agricultural land, and poor eating habits. Similarly, Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child stunting at 41 percent.
References:
Country profile: Bangladesh. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2016, from https://feedthefuture.gov/country/bangladesh
Kirby Kissinger
Food Security
Food Security
ISSUE BRIEFINGS
1. What is the problem about? What are the dimensions of this problem worldwide? In your country? What are the risks?
Bangladesh has wide spread unmapped areas making it difficult to create resilience towards food security improvement, transportation, economic growth and nutrition to address hunger and end poverty.
Many countries worldwide deal with these same issues at different levels along with other issues such as flooding and the rate of first respondents. By improving the areas of which are unmapped, map data collection can help create resilience in all of these places.
Lack of Food Security in Bangladesh is the result of many factors such as climate change, including scarce water resources, rising sea level, vulnerability to extreme shocks, and changing weather patterns. Population growth, urbanization, and soil and natural resource depletion have led to degradation of Bangladesh’s land, water bodies, wetlands, and forests and pose a significant threat to the agriculture sector.
Without food security Bangladesh runs the risks of poverty, lack of access to agricultural land, and poor eating habits. Similarly, Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child stunting at 41 percent.
References:
Country profile: Bangladesh. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2016, from https://feedthefuture.gov/country/bangladesh
Kirby Kissinger
2. What solutions are offered to address / mitigate / recover from this problem? What does this mean for resilience?
Bangladesh and other countries who lack adequate geographical data suffer from many complex problems. Without strong data it is difficult to assess a country’s needs, determine risk to natural disasters and establish routs to which people can use to access facilities they may need. Feed the Future and other organizations are working in Bangladesh towards achieving a sustainable and resilient country. One way to achieve resilience is to decreasing risk through data access which is one of the aims of such organizations. An important method organizations and the people of Bangladesh are working towards resilience is by creating open special data with focus on specific regions at a time according to Feed the Future Bangladesh. A benefit of open data is that it allows anyone to contribute and anyone to access. This is one of the many ways communities such as the Khulna District in Bangladesh are achieving resilience – USAID and others are taking advantage of the opportunity to engage thousands of users on projects by engaging large human networks such as Youth Mappers, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), as well as other open data organizations in focusing on high demand projects such as Bangladesh. By providing geospecial data communities in Bangladesh are able to build resilience by having better means to predict risk. The power of crowed sourcing such as what is being created in Bangladesh helps increases resilience by creating transparency, awareness, access, and knowledge.
-Julia Kleine
References:
https://www.feedthefuture.gov/country/bangladesh
Capitol Hill Event Lauches University Consortium to Engage Student Mappers. Retreved March 29, 2016, from http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2015/11/capitol-hill-event-launches- university- consortium-to-engage-student-mappers
3. What is happening in the specific country you are working on with respect to this problem? Who is affected and how?
Khulna, Bangladesh
This mapping project directly supports agricultural programs in Bangladesh. Data created from this mapping effort will be used by USAID and its partners who are working with rural farming villages in Bangladesh. It is intended to help communities in the Khulna District improve land management and increase agricultural production.
The desired outcome from this project is to have an accurate and complete transportation network, along with features that can be used for agriculture such as rivers, ditches, ponds, and buildings.
The people that are affected by this would be the people located in the rural areas that actually do the farming and the labor that is needed for the farming to take place, and also the poor that had no choice but to live outside of the towns because they could not afford to live there. Also people that are locate near all of the hundreds of streams and lakes and ditches to be able to be reached the quickest without be blockaded by some kind of water. Especially in times of heavy flooding thanks to the monsoons that affect this country yearly and sometimes leave the country side in desolation. This project will help to bring services to these people in the event of a natural disaster the quickest possible such as food and water that they will desperately need.
Ian Smith
4. What are you mapping and how can mapping these features help make communities more resilient in light of this problem or in areas affected by this problem?
When considering the topic of aiding resilience, it is important to know that the central idea is to resolving challenges of capacity building, integral development, and governance itself. Definitions of resilience vary from organization to organization, but USAID defines it as “the ability of individuals, households, communities, institutions, nations, or even value chains and ecosystems to withstand crises, recover from them, and adapt so as to better withstand them” (Runde). Concerning the topic of food security in Khulna, Bangladesh, specific features are being focused on for this project to ensure resiliency for the food security in Khulna, Bangladesh.
Since Bangladesh has a tropical wet season and a dry season, agricultural land in the Khulna District of Bangladesh varies greatly depending on the season. Therefore, it is a priority for our team to map the water features in order to highlight any potential access to water in the district. Specifically, we are mapping rivers, ditches and ponds. The Rupsa River runs right through Khulna and is vital for the agriculture taking place.
Access to this river as well as the ponds in the district are what make it possible to have irrigation to the farm lands. Ponds are important due to being bodies of water that can have multiple functions, for example, fish ponds, shrimp ponds, irrigation, and hydrating livestock during the dry months. Ditches are important features to map because ditches can be used to move the water for irrigation, drain the water from low lying areas, and are often found along the roadside to prevent flooding and help keep roads open during the wet season.
In addition to mapping water bodies, buildings and roads are also a priority. It is important to establish what buildings are already in exisitence and what could be potentially usful to ensuring food security to the district. At this time, the project is not focusing on determining the types of buildings but more just making sure they are mapped for future use to a team who can determine the actual type. As for roads, the order of priority in type of roads being mapped is: national highways, regional highways, zilla roads and then unclassfied roads. Access to these roads are important for mapping out possible routes in order to transport food from farm lands to villages and cities. It is important to note the order of priority of these roads to be mapped because the zilla roads and unclassfied roads are prone to flooding.
By mapping water bodies, buildings and roads, this project is providing a step in the right direction in order to ensure resiliency to the Khulna District. By mapping these features, the people of Khulna can determine exactly where to access water and how to travel around the region efficiently.
Reference:
Resilience: A Critical Framework for Development. Runde, Savoy. Center for Strategic and International Studies (2014)
Tracing Guide to Food Security in Khulna, Bangladesh (http://hotosm.github.io/tracing-guides/guide/kulna.html)
John Wells
guide/kulna.html)
John Wells
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