A sports enthusiast, Neeraj Nepali, who enjoys cycling, hiking and traveling to new places in his free time, is the Hoste

Hainse Board's Vice-President, who has been enriching the board discussions with his expertise and ideas since 2008, although he has been part of the Hoste Hainse family since 1999 via Lotus Holdings, the flagship "business with ethics" social enterprise that spawned Formation Carpets/Hoste Hainse like companies across multiple verticals. Therefore, being part of the Hoste Hainse Board became natural.

 

He describes his relationship to Hoste Hainse as consistent and professional, although he feels a strong bond towards the

Hoste Hainse family especially because it has remained small throughout the years. Neeraj went to AVM School, which was one of the first private English medium schools at the time, and has his MBA Degree in Management Studies from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu and partly from the UK.

 

From 2004 to 2006, Neeraj lived in Australia where his wife studied (she works as a Gender and Social Development

Expert), and he helped out as a house husband as well as a consultant later on. This is where Neeraj continued his involvement in World Bank activities which led him to visit Washington DC in 2005. There he worked as a consultant for entrepreneurship and innovations and became a certified trainer in the infoDEV program in 2012, which yielded in him providing his expertise in countries like Thailand and India.

 

Nowadays Neeraj works as a freelance management consultant based in Kathmandu and working in other Asian countries

like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Myanmar with a specialization on market systems development and creating market opportunities for rural enterprises. So, within the Hoste Hainse Board discussions, Neeraj mainly helps develop new strategies, profiles and systems. For example, he was one of the key members of the first Hoste Hainse Policy Guidelines and the Hoste Hainse Operations Guidelines.

 

For Neeraj, Hoste Hainse's biggest strengths lie in its persistent and consistent dedication towards its objectives. Another

important point for him is that all of Hoste Hainse's Board and founding members have been supportive of Hoste Hainse for a long time and that Hoste Hainse is not big-donor-dependent.

 

On the flip side, he believes that if Hoste Hainse will be able to improve on professionalism, find more people who can

stick to commitments without any effort and become more competitive and proactive, it has the potential to grow exponentially in the future. He believes education models can be developed and replicated out of a mixed mindset which contains development, government and private perspectives.

 

Neeraj's vision for Nepal is it becoming a peaceful, peace-loving but still competitive, which grows with what it has and not

with what is brought in. He would rather see people working in one shift professionally than in double shifts unprofessionally, and hopes to see different development programs in Nepal which are sustainable result led and principle based.