It’s always wonderful to see Nepalis doing great things and it gets even better when their work gets recognized globally — that too by the leading business magazine, Forbes.
The magazine started the 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2016, with the names of 300 “promising young leaders, daring entrepreneurs and game changers in 10 different sectors” — 30 in each. While the first list didn’t feature any Nepali individuals, we finally made a debut in the 2017 list as YouTuber Prabhat Yadav of Explore Gadgets and the founder of Diyalo Foundation, Surya Karki made the list.
We made it even bigger in the year 2018 as a record number of six Nepalis — Ayushi KC, founder of Khaalisi; Anjal Niraula, managing director of Gham Power; Kanchan Amatya, founder of Sustainable Fish Farming Initiative; and the three co-founders of Eco Cell Industries, Nishan Shrestha, Sacheet Pandit and Subash Shrestha were part of the list. But 2019 wasn’t really our year as nobody from Nepal was included on the list. No worries, because we are back again!
The Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Class of 2020 is here and we’ve got four spots among 300 dynamic youths.
Rohit Tiwari (28) – Foodmario
Rohit Tiwari and his team feed hundreds of people everyday but they don’t own a single restaurant. He just connects home chefs to hungry people digitally. Impressive, eh?
“Foodmario is a Nepal-based digital platform that connects home chefs with customers to deliver home-cooked food. Founded by Rohit Tiwari, the platform enables anyone, from housewives to students, to earn an income by cooking and selling food from their home kitchens. To date, Foodmario says it delivered more than 100,000 meals while working with more than 100 home chefs”, writes Forbes. He is listed on Social Entrepreneurs sector.
Shubhangi Rana (23), Jesselina Rana (24) – Pad2Go
Rohit is not the only Nepali to be on the list of 30 Social Entrepreneurs as giving him the company is the engineer-lawyer duo of Shubangi Rana and Jesselina Rana, the co-founders of Pad2Go.
Here’s what Forbes has to say about them: ” Shubhangi Rana, an engineer, and Jesselina Rana, a human rights lawyer, started Pad2Go in Nepal in 2018 as a for-profit social enterprise to focus on menstrual health and remove the taboos around it. It has set up 80 vending machines for sanitary napkins in four of Nepal’s seven provinces. Each machine’stationed across schools, hospitals, movie theaters, banks, offices?can provide sanitary napkins for 200 women. It also conducts workshops to address taboos around menstruation and works with manufacturers of sanitary napkins to get them cheaply. Pad2Go won the first prize at the AGUASAN workshop in Switzerland and second prize in Singapore at the startup pitch contest for Asian women-led businesses organized by INSEAD and Facebook. “
Pratima Sherpa (20)
While Pratima has yet to achieve her dream of becoming the first female pro golfer of Nepal, I would still pay to see a film based on her life already. Her journey has been absolutely phenomenal and inspiring — from growing up in a shed at Royal Nepal Golf Club to meeting and learning from the golf legend Tiger Woods.
Forbes writes, “Pratima Sherpa was raised in a maintenance shed behind the third hole of the Royal Nepal Golf Course. Her first club, at age 11, was a wooden stick that her father made from a branch. Today she is Nepal’s first ranked amateur female golfer. Her parents still live in that shed. Sherpa is currently in her second year of college at the Santa Barbara City College. Her dream is to be Nepal’s first ever female golf pro and to represent her country internationally.” She is part of the Entertainment and Sports list along with Parasite actress Park So-dam and popular K-pop group Twice.
Kiran Timsina (28), Nikita Acharya (26) – Urban Girl
Who else is there? Our very own Urban Girl co-founders, Kiran Timsina and Nikita Acharya making it to the Retail & Ecommerce list.
According to Forbes, “With an initial investment of $200, Nikita Acharya and Kiran Timsina cofounded Urban Girl in 2012, one of the earliest ecommerce startups in Nepal. The site started out by selling fashion jewelry and customized products like tee-shirts and water bottles, and expanded to a wider range of products such as makeup, home decor and electronics. Today it employs more than 50 people and operates in two major cities, Kathmandu and Pokhara. In 2016, they expanded the business to add a bakery, UG Cakes, to sell cakes online. UG Cakes trains and hires deaf women for the bakery in collaboration with Nepal’s Gandaki Deaf Association.”
Congratulations, fellas. We are proud of you!
