En route to improved agronomic literacy

Masuriya, a rural village in Nepal’s Gauriganga municipality, was one of the villages affected during the country’s civil war which ran from 1996-2006. Since 2012, Bandana Joshi, chairperson of a local cooperative, has been encouraging women in her village to optimize fertilizer application to maximize plant growth and profitability, and improve livelihoods. However, her journey to this day was not an easy one.

In the years of the civil war, women in the villages like Masuriya faced the burden to make ends meet for their children and elderly family members, as most men fled in fear of war or migrated to earn income. It was during this time that Joshi and a group of 24 women who were operating a savings and credit firm realized that more women in their village needed monetary support to carry out their livelihood activities.