From Waste to Weave: Turning Banana Waste into Livelihoods in Nepal’s Terai

Every year, Nepal’s banana farmers harvest over 404,000 metric tons of fruit and discard the rest of the plant. That waste, more than a million tons of it, pollutes waterways, releases methane, and is often burned in the open, a cost farmers absorb with no return.

At the same time, global demand for natural fiber is rising, and a small number of Nepali cooperatives are already proving the model works. A cooperative in Tikapur, Kailali has spent two years producing banana fiber yarn and still cannot meet demand. A Nawalparasi-based organization has built fiber extraction infrastructure for compostable products. The bottleneck isn’t whether banana fiber can be made. It’s whether it can be made at scale, by the people already positioned to do it: rural women in the Terai with existing textile skills and cooperative structures, looking for income that doesn’t require leaving their communities.

Navara Institute is running a field feasibility study across Nawalparasi and Kailali to test whether a community-led banana fiber value chain can connect farmers, women’s cooperatives, and ethical global markets, and to build the evidence base for a full pilot.

Community Knowledge Hub: Community-Led Climate Adaptation in Nepal

Farmers in Nepal’s Terai face a bind: climate variability is rising just as the knowledge systems that once managed that risk are eroding. Locally adapted seeds have given way to hybrid dependency. Traditional water management has been abandoned without replacement. Women, who now carry most farm labor due to male out-migration, have the least control over inputs, credit, and markets.

What’s missing isn’t information or technology. Extension services already exist here. What’s missing is a community-owned platform where local knowledge, shared resources, and decision-making work together instead of as disconnected household-level fixes.

The Community Knowledge Hub is Navara Institute’s pilot response: services designed jointly with the community they serve, where documenting and testing locally-held agricultural and ecological knowledge happens through that work rather than as separate research. Communities decide what gets documented, on what terms, and whether findings are shared beyond the community.

The pilot builds on Navara’s existing relationships in the Terai through our banana fiber work. The specific pilot community and practices have not yet been decided. That decision belongs to the communities we’re in conversation with, not to us in advance.