Sustainable Village Community Composting

The Sustainable Village Community Composting project has identified that improving the livelihoods of the Nepalese village of Chainpur requires a phased action plan that starts with a more sustainable use of agriculture. Currently, much of the land is cultivated using chemical fertilisers and the villagers struggle to move beyond minimal sustenance with the products of their land. By using a turned windrows composting techniques, VolNepal aims to engage the community in a sustainable form of compost production to have a healthier land and healthier products. This vision follows a collaborative, co-operative model and it is designed to be a grassroot solution that starts from a small number of villagers to then comprise the entire community. This is a fundamentally bottom-up approach that empowers the community to collaborate on a project that improves their livelihoods. 

The inhabitants of the village of Chainpur, in Nepal, are all affected by a low quality of life, and similarly in other communities in Nepal and in the Global South more generally. The main source of sustenance in the village is agriculture, which does not prove a reliable means to improve livelihoods with the current means because of its low productivity and scarce resources. The villagers primarily utilise chemical fertilisers, which degrades the quality of the soil, making its products even less appropriate for expansion. Other factors contributing to this problem are lack of technical knowledge, and primary agricultural resources and tools. The current agricultural situation does not allow the villagers to access a better quality of life and to consume sustainable products, which would not only improve their health, but that of their environment as well. Importantly, the quality of the yields of the village has an important impact on the long-term health of the villagers, as those are consumed both by children and pregnant women. A healthy agricultural produce is fundamental in ensuring the health of generations to come, as chemically-grown products have been shown to have negative impacts on human health.

VolNepal's Sustainable Village Community Composting suggests creating a co-operative organisation within the village, using an available building as headquarters, which would set to organise a sustainable and reliable fertiliser for the villagers' cultivated land. The composting technique which would be utilised is turned windrows, whereby the villagers can dispose of their household waste (and manure) to create an elongated pile that they can turn and ventilate through a rotation of the volunteers of the co-operative. This natural and sustainable fertiliser is then shared in proportionate measure amongst the villagers. This requires adequate technological support, such as a bucket loader, for the villagers to turn the windrow in a timely manner and adequate to the amount of compost that is produced. It also requires covering for the winter, but its main source of keeping is from the villagers themselves. It will provide a starting point for a regenerative agricultural system for the villagers and a healthier ecosystem for their future.

The recipients of the Sustainable Village Community Composting will be the residents of Chainpur, and those of the other villages that will be involved in the scheme. Chainpur is inhabited by 572 inhabitants. The majority of people belong to the Brahman/Brahmin caste (12.2% of the total Nepal population), but there are nevertheless some villages belonging to other ethnic groups and castes who live in worse economic, educational and hygienic conditions than the Brahmins. The majority of the working population works on their agricultural land, but the use of land currently is unproductive and does not give high enough yields for the villagers to move beyond a condition of self-sustenance. They are also not well-connected to other economic locations, such as an external market where they would be able to commercialise their agricultural yields.

The villagers are both the leaders, actors and recipients of the benefits of the Sustainable Village Community Composting project, which requires their participation throughout in order to be considered a successful empowerment project. VolNepal acts as an enabler of this project by providing the villagers with the necessary resources to enact it and by supporting their agency and autonomy by creating a learning environment and providing access to agricultural expertise. VolNepal engages with the villagers directly, asking them what they want to see next and what they feel they need to progress with the project, making them the effective leaders. VolNepal wants them to be enthusiastic about Sustainable Village Community Composting, which would make them less reliable on chemical fertilisers and would enable them to grow healthier and sellable products, and most importantly, for them to be the ones carrying it forward. We believe that having a community-based fertiliser project will strengthen the sense of community, including those parts of the population who are generally set aside in community life, and make fertilisation self-sufficient and sustainable. This will ensure that the project is inclusive and that a multiplicity of voices are given power in the decision-making process.

Chainpur faces a problem of not having a resilient ecosystem due to unsustainable, chemical-based agricultural practices, which constitute the main source of sustenance for the villagers. Bringing the village towards regenerative agricultural methods is fundamental to secure the ecosystem health of these fields that are fundamental to the villagers' livelihoods. The solution starts by an essential component of regenerative agriculture - a sustainable fertiliser - and suggests that the villagers create an inclusive and collaborative co-operative which utilises a turned windrows fertiliser method out of domestic, plant and animal compost to effectively start regenerating their land.

The idea has been shared with the villagers, who feel positive and excited about it, but the project prototype has not yet been put in place. It is first necessary to identify where the windrow could be located, how this would be managed with seasonal change and in case of unpredictable weather events (such as the 2015 Nepal earthquake), how to divide up the tasks of windrow turning and importantly, to gather the technological means to effectively manage a windrow pile, which includes transportation, turning tools, and so forth.

This solution is innovative because it is dedicated to involve the villagers of Chainpur into a bottom-up effort to improve their livelihoods starting from what is already available to them, meaning food waste, manure, dead leaves, hay and so forth. We expect it to change Nepalese communities if applied in other villages, as it starts from the most basic sustenance activity - agriculture - and aims to be scaled up through an approach that is devoted to creating a sense of support and community amongst the participants. This also aims to avoid problems connected to top-down approaches, which can be non-adaptable to the specific conditions of the community and highly expensive. Instead, turned windrows can be managed by volunteers and only requires an effective system of management, conceptualised as a co-operative, and minimal technology required by waste management.