Kathmandu Living Labs — Open Cities Mapping for Seismic Resilience

Nepal sits on an active seismic fault line, and before 2012 the Kathmandu Valley had no reliable digital map of its building stock, schools or hospitals — a major blind spot for disaster planning. Under the World Bank's Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) Open Data for Resilience Initiative, the Government of Nepal, the World Bank, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and USAID launched the "Open Cities Kathmandu" project in November 2012.

Student volunteers, including a partnership with George Washington University, combined remote digitisation with door-to-door verification. Over roughly two years the project digitised footprints for 126,105 buildings, mapped 3,716 km of road network, and structurally surveyed 2,256 schools and 350 health facilities, training more than 1,500 residents in OpenStreetMap editing. The team behind the project became Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL), a nonprofit civic-technology living lab, in 2013.

The payoff came on 25 April 2015, when a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck. KLL and HOT rapidly updated the open map with damage assessments and road-passability data; the Nepal Army, Nepal Red Cross and international relief agencies used this crowdsourced, freely downloadable data for emergency response — the first time Kathmandu had an open, near-real-time map of affected areas plus a pre-existing database of school and health-facility vulnerability to prioritise reconstruction. KLL later contributed to Nepal's Rural Housing Reconstruction Programme's mobile data-collection systems.

KLL has since broadened into youth digital-skills training, civic engagement, mapping of secondary cities such as Pokhara, and pandemic and flood-response mapping. By its own reporting it has run 30+ projects, engaged more than 5,000 people, held 200+ events and works with over 40 partner organisations, with a core staff of around 14.

Independent metrics on outcomes beyond the mapping and training numbers — for instance, how much the maps reduced casualties or reconstruction time — are not rigorously quantified in public sources; impact is documented mainly through process and output metrics and qualitative testimony from responders rather than a controlled evaluation. The model also remains donor-dependent, with World Bank/GFDRR, HOT and USAID funding underpinning its founding phase.

Read the full analysis: https://kathmandulivinglabs.org/about-us