In Our Hands Participants' Bios

Initiated by duo Aditya Neupane and Ashwinee Kharel, their project "Sweet and Sustainable" aims to manufacture bio-degradable cutleries from bagasse and other wastages. The project will not only help reduce single-use plastic wastage but also uplift the livelihood of marginalised people via direct and indirect employment. This eco-friendly project has diverse economic, social and climate resilience.  

Asta Narayan Dhimal’s idea is to make perfumes out of Keya flowers, which grows in the Wetland of eastern Nepal. It has a fruity smell and is used as perfume by the Dhimal community. Kewa Flower although useful for various purposes and is on the verge of extinction. The idea is to expand the cultivation to produce eco-friendly perfumes and reduce imports from outside.  

Aayush Chauhan is a graduate of Civil Engineering. His idea- NAMLO is to create a load carrier for construction worker using old unused furniture and bamboo. The product can be a life changing kit for workers who risks their body and health to earn money for their livelihood.

Led by two Entrepreneurs,Bibek Khanal and Saroj Paneru, Eco-Friendly Model Village is designed to build an environment-friendly village with the aim of promoting ecotourism. The project targets economic empowerment of the community by converting waste materials into value. In the first phase, the project will design biodegradable product as a possible alternative to an existing product. 

Design Craft is the idea of three women, Ganga Timalsina, Sarina Shilpakar and Anjana Timalsina. Their idea is to preserve the traditional art and crafts of various indigenous groups by producing 3D visualizations as well as developing and creating products and designs suitable for the market. They want to incorporate and emphasise locally available nature-based materials like hay, straw, and bamboo which are sustainable and environmentally friendly.

Lalit Awasthi’s idea is about biogas. Biogas is a green energy source in the form of electricity and heat for the local grid in the initial phase and then national. There will be fewer emissions of the greenhouse gases like methane, CO2, and nitrous oxide. It burns without smoke and hence does not cause air pollution. This is an environmentally friendly recirculation of organic waste from industry and households. 

Larisha Lamsal is a Computer Engineering undergraduate student and an activist advocating for sustainable development, green IT, and providing technology to combat climate change. Her project name is Clean Cloud. She aims to provide energy consulting services for users’ cloud data through an application to limit the usage of the cloud to control the emission of carbon.

Project Tajilaji aims to protect, promote, sustainably manage, and restore nature-based products. This year they are focusing on Hemp, which is naturally breathable, thermoregulating, CO2 absorbing, antibacterial and antifungal. They are passionate about reducing the use of synthetic materials and returning to natural/sustainable plant-based materials; creating products which would reduce their footprint on the planet. 

Wetlands for Nepal- the idea is to utilize nature-based solutions for biodiversity conservation, wetland restoration, and climate and disaster resilience. These solutions are also aimed to transform the ecological features of wetlands into economical revenues to maintain the implemented solutions and improve the livelihood of local youth. 

Mira Lamichhane is an environmentalist and researcher deeply interested in investigating and analyzing environmental problems and developing solutions to them. Her project idea- Refill to Reduce, aims at providing services to refill household products that reduce the plastics packaging waste in Kathmandu in the first phase and will be expanded to other cities in Nepal. 

Promote  commercial bamboo farming in the bare land of chure/mountain range of Nepal which reduces hazards like landslides/erosion etc. By using indigenous knowledge, his team will manufacture bamboo products like cups, hangers, toothbrushes and straw while also providing training to the rural people and creating employment opportunities, thus promote economic growth and protecting the environment.

Pratima Bhatta from Gorkha wants to build an eco-village that is sustainable on its own, be it economic, social, or cultural. Her dream eco-village starts with identifying a small backward community village and making them both economically as well as socially empowered. 

As an entrepreneur and an artist from Nepalgunj, she loves innovatively solving complex issues. By collaborating with the women of different communities of terai, she wants to upcycle and reuse the discarded textiles commonly found in every household to create attractive accessories, decorative items and much more. 

Rajya Banu’s idea is to create a nature-based, community-run industry that will produce products such as paper and bio-fuel, from agro wastes, establishing an ecosystem-based, green economy by using the traditional indigenous knowledge and enhancing the capacity of the locals to archive and industrialize their skills and locally available resources. 

She is an architect interested in Nepalese traditional art and architecture. Nepalese art and craft are nature-friendly and carry stories and skills over generations. Her project idea- SHILPA, aims to work on customizing these traditional art products as luxury art and décor items to do well in the local and global markets. 

Since her childhood, she had the privilege to observe all the processes of paper making and several arts and craft forms of paper. With ‘Lokta’ becoming rare, she wants to research more on other forms of raw materials that can be found easily in the surroundings, other than the limited paper-making alternatives used by the producers.  

Mom’s Store Nepal is registered as a non-profit distributing company. They are driven by the idea to make it sustainable. They have created a platform where one can buy/sell preloved clothes (for children) across Nepal. They intend to raise awareness about fashion footprints and extend the life cycle of clothes, thus reducing the need for production. 

He is an undergraduate mechanical engineering student. He is actively working to bring solutions for the problems related to climate change, energy crisis and CO2 emission. His research idea is to reduce the thermal load consumption in the residential building through passive and active retrofitting which eventually reduce the CO2 emission from the houses and contribute to solving energy crisis problem. 

He is a wood carver from Bungmati. Wood carving is a traditional art and is also closely linked to tourism. His idea is to promote traditional Newari sculpture by conducting workshops in different places as well as creating awareness about the environment. While wood is environmentally friendly, as an artist, he wants to act responsibly by replanting new trees in the community.

She wants to create eco-friendly carbon-neutral building materials incorporating cow dung ash. She aims to provide an alternative source of income for traditional Nepali farmers. She also hopes to measure the slope stability of land with Sloping Agricultural Land Technology (SALT) farming to see if it is viable in a landslide-prone country like Nepal. 

Mamta is an engineering student. Her start-up ETTA is about converting waste plastics into cost-effective and sustainable bricks that could reduce plastic waste and be used in construction. Thus contributing to reducing the effect of climate change.