River Integration for Developing Food Security

Create a community-based StartUp for food security that integrated with ecological river tourism in urban riverbank community.

Combining tourism, ecology, urban agriculture, and technology to improve the livability of urban river ecosystem and human being surrounding the area. So, the human needs can be fulfilled with optimizing river health.

Ciliwung River Ecosystem as the biggest river flows through Megacity Jakarta. The river is the most polluted and populated. Polluted mostly by domestic wastes and populated by the low-income community on its riparian. This condition threat and suffering people, water, and river habitat. Most of the people unemployed, less nutritious and less environmental education. 

People use water river for washing and taking a bath. But, they also throw their waste directly there. However, existing mini gardens and much cultural uniqueness along riparian could be a prospect to support them in food security through farming and ecological tourism.

Had limited budget and low technology never stop my team and me to empower the community in the riverbank. We had done it for three years in Code River, Yogyakarta. We revealed the community had low income, love farming, potentially care the river health, but they did not have any encouragement from external support to explore the ability in farming, food production, and local river management. 

So, it would be awesome to establish a community-based StartUp that can be sustained and also adopted by many urban areas including in Megacity Jakarta, for raising food security and river health. 

Social capital will be developed, impacted and strengthen the community to work together solving food security and river health that encouraged by internet based information and technology. Then, that will increase urban community values into greater income economically, cultural and river preservation from urban food production (urban farming) and ecological river tourism. 

The impact will be perceived by local community its self as the subject of this community-based StartUp. Government and private sector give support and cooperate in this project. It would be deployed by resulting food production, giving the taxes for tourism, and advertised for further success.

Organization establishment letter and management team then acknowledged by city government. - Local community organization (total members: 150 family) can be established along Ciliwung, the biggest urban river, for local food production (farming) and their StartUp.

websites counter visitation and people counted that use our tourism service - 5000 people visit community website and 300 people get the service of ecological river tour.

counted family and their mini edible home garden established along urban riverbank. - 150 family grow and maintain their diversed-edible mini garden at their home along urban riverbank

Handling our weakness and vulnerability such as polluted river we have, we still can educate people through tourism and turn the river to be clean. That's the way of our thinking. 

Integrated low-income people, environmental issue, and technology that can be useful for them are not easy. Also, relating the technology into their real world feels like it does not make sense. But, this is the uniqueness and challenge that we believe can possibly overcome at the same time. We also believe that this is very practicable and applicable to be applied in the developing urban area.

The technology for community-based StartUp using web-based information system, apps or agricultural technology for farming can be reachable to the community, even for low-income people. We want to down to earth and facilitate them to pursue the food sufficient and get the higher income by this alternative farming and ecological river tourism that they can involve in their daily life. 

We had built the similar project that involved the community from the beginning till the end. We also have a big desire that we can establish more involvement of communities through this community-based StartUp. 

Our solution will be deployed by involving the community in the process of creating community-based StartUp and their website, apps and other possible platforms. We will observe and survey potential people in the community that invite them in the community to develop this project together. 

This would be affordable and accessible by using the local resource, potential local people, and also collaborations with the expert who can transfer the knowledge to elevate this StartUp.

As an initiation, we research the solution using participatory of a community by voluntary based funding. We also will engage city government and related private company to let their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funding our solution. Then, we plan to apply crowd funding and grant application for running our pilot. Then, we develop the community-based StartUp by training them in farming, raising food production, saving seed bank until ecological river tourism design. Furthermore, we are going to use an internet-based system and member based funding for promotion in tourism and invite people involved in our food production project in the community. The income from the ecological river tourism will be used for providing community farming technology and growing our StartUp. For scaling, we are going to cooperate with the private sector to invest in our StartUp so that we can establish community-based StartUp in another region. 

The factors that can be challenge and limitation of our solution are community engagement process, the technology knowledge adaptation, and also funding. Community engagement process would be quite hard to let them understand the need of community resilient by building their collective attitude. But, I had experienced that It could be successful to engage the community by revealed and support their needs.Technology adaptation can be handled by the facilitator who can transfer technical knowledge more simply description to a community. Funding would be a big challenge for us in initiation/research and pilot stage. 

https://www.instagram.com/maritanitanam/

Solve will be a very great and powerful technology based to develop our solution. Even in our case that creating local food solution and applied ecological river tourism in the local community can be expanded into the big online market through online urban farming education and learning, online service or virtual river tourism. 

We are very sure that Solve will be the right place to reach what we dream. We are sure we can have opportunity to get the best mentor, the best expertise to cooperate helping people to reach the sustainable community.

Our current partners are the local community along an urban river in Megacity Jakarta, NGOs related to care in urban river health, local city government around Jakarta, private sector related to urban agriculture, and the researcher in urban river and agriculture.

We don't have any competitor or any conflict of interest in the application process.