Wildlife vet Jess Bodgener is back in Nepal and last week she visited colleagues Mahip KC and Pradip Bastola at the National Innovation Centre (NIC) in Kathmandu.

Founded in 2012, the NIC is a non-profit sharing organisation dedicated to developing a culture of research, technology and innovation in Nepal. Onsite individuals can access various tools and facilities, which they can use to help turn ideas into reality. They can also access support from industry experts who provide advice on everything from electrical engineering to business management and marketing.

Jess, who is a PhD student at the University of Kent and fond of tinkering herself, described it as:

“a uniquely exciting and inspiring environment… think scrapheap challenge meets a start-up hub.. it’s an inventor’s dream come true! What makes it even better is that most of the projects are addressing important national challenges. The first time I visited, the guys were working on an order of low-cost incubators for newborn babies, and this time I learned all about a collaboration with MIT to develop drones capable of delivering lifesaving medicine to hard-to-reach areas - something particularly relevant in a country so frequently affected by earthquakes, flooding and landslides.”

Jess, Mahip and Pradip are working together to develop low-cost open-source GPS collars that can be used to monitor leopards translocated in response to human-wildlife conflict. Being able to monitor these animals after release is really important, but the costs, and logistical challenges of importation often mean there aren’t the collars available.

The team are hoping by designing and producing these low-cost collars in Nepal they can start to change this!

On the desk in front of Mahip and Pradip you can see a collection of components and wires that have been assembled into a very basic prototype based on a paper published by Conrad J. Foley and Claudio Sillero-Zubiri 2020. The aim is to develop this over the coming weeks, until they have something they can trial on street dogs. Watch this space!

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