Hack4SafeFood: Hackathon for Innovating Food Safety in Nepal 🧑‍💻

Call for Participation!!!

Calling all undergraduate IT students ! 👋 Join in teams of 3–5 and take part in a dynamic hackathon focused on tackling Food Safety Issues in Nepal through innovative thinking and cutting-edge tech. 🚀

This is your chance to identify gaps, challenge assumptions, and co-create solutions that could reshape Nepal's food safety ecosystem. Whether it's building a mobile app for street vendors📱, a traceability system for dairy cooperatives 🥛, or a public reporting dashboard for municipalities 📊, your contributions can make a real-world impact on the future of food safety.🌍

📅 Event Details

📅 Date: June 2 – June 6, 2025 (Jestha 19 – Jestha 23) 🏢 Orientation Venue: National Soil Science Research Center – NARC, Kathmandu 📍 Pitching Venue: DFTQC, SPS Hall, Kathmandu 👥 Team Members: 3–5 💰 Registration Cost: Free ⏳ Registration Deadline: Saturday, May 31, 2025 (Jestha 17)

🧾 Background

Food safety is critical to public health ❤️‍⚕️, economic stability 📈, and consumer confidence ✅. It encompasses the entire food value chain, ensuring protection from contaminants and foodborne illnesses. 🛡️

In Nepal, increasing cases of foodborne diseases expose deep-rooted issues — misuse of chemicals, poor hygiene in food processing and retail, and ineffective enforcement of safety standards. ⚠️ Risks extend from pesticide-laden vegetables 🥦 to adulterated dairy products 🥛, and affect both urban and rural populations 🏘️. The informal sector adds to the complexity, while climate change ☀️, urbanization 🏙️, and globalization 🌍 place additional strain on an already fragile system.

This hackathon comes at a pivotal moment — when digital transformation 💻 can bridge the gaps and ensure safer food for all. 🤝

🎯 Objective of the Hackathon

📢 Raise awareness of key food safety issues in Nepal, from contamination to weak enforcement 💡 Promote digital technologies (e.g., mobile apps, blockchain, IoT, AI, data analytics) for monitoring, traceability, and education 🚀 Provide a platform for innovative, scalable solutions to food safety challenges 👩‍💻 Engage youth and startups in creating user-friendly, affordable, and localized innovations 🤝 Foster multi-sector collaboration among government, private sector, academia, and civil society 🧪 Identify and support promising ideas for pilot programs and policy integration

📌 Statement of Problem

Nepal’s food safety ecosystem spans the full farm-to-fork journey, involving both formal and informal players — but it's riddled with gaps. Low awareness, lack of oversight, inadequate infrastructure, and poor coordination have made contamination and unsafe practices dangerously common. 💔

⚠️ Key Challenges:

⚗️ Misuse of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and veterinary drugs, bypassing Good Agricultural Practices (GAP)
💉 Antibiotic misuse in livestock/aquaculture, raising antimicrobial resistance risks
🚿 Poor hygiene in post-harvest handling due to inadequate training and infrastructure
📉 Low adoption of food safety standards (e.g., GMP, HACCP) in small food businesses
🛒 Unsanitary conditions among street vendors, often operating unregulated
❄️ Weak or absent cold chains, particularly in remote areas
🚫 Rampant adulteration using harmful or non-food-grade additives
🤷 Minimal public knowledge of nutrition labeling and safe food practices
🏷️ Inconsistent or missing product labeling and consumer safety info
🧩 Overlapping regulatory mandates and weak inter-agency coordination
🧪 Limited inspection staff, under-equipped labs, and fragile enforcement systems
🌍 Emerging threats from climate change, urban growth, and increasing processed food consumption
📲 No robust digital systems for traceability, recalls, or outbreak tracking

These challenges are interconnected and demand local, scalable innovations to improve food safety for everyone in Nepal. 🌟

🧰 Technologies That Can Help:

🔗 Blockchain-based traceability systems 💻 Software Development: Mobile and web applications 🌐 IoT (Internet of Things) 🤖 AI, Machine Learning, and Generative AI

🚀 Final Note

Nepal is at the crossroads of digital innovation and food system transformation. 🤝 Hack4SafeFood presents a unique opportunity to bridge regulatory gaps and real-world needs through creative, tech-driven solutions. 💡 Organized by Vertex in collaboration with the Government of Nepal DFTQC, I2I, NEFOSTA, and NARC.

Be part of the change. Code the future of safe food in Nepal. 💻

Hack4SafeFood: Hackathon for Innovating Food Safety in Nepal