My Story

Intro

The age-old curriculum in Nepal promotes a system where being educated simply means memorizing information without caring much for the level of understanding and skill development in students. To add to its woes, even the classroom environment is not up to the scratch. Nimesh is aiming to change this old dusty education system with the help of other students countrywide.

About Me

At 18, I am the founder of an ambitious education project called Minimally Invasive Education, which aims at revolutionizing the education system of Nepal. It has been a little less than two years when I was a student at Budhanilkantha School, the national school of Nepal where even the members of Nepali Royal Family had once studied. It was the only national school of Nepal, where the best educational opportunities were provided. I was too young, back then, to be thinking about a majority of people of my age who never get the opportunity like I did. But as I grew older and completed my schooling, I really developed a sense of the dire straits of education that surrounded the country. I had been fortunate to be educated in one of the best schools in the country and therefore thought it is my responsibility to start something new, to do something in the direction of solving the educational woes of the country.

Along with a group of other friends I started visiting a nearby government school, which had far less good study facilities. We started mentoring the young students there and taking them for field visits. What started as a small initiative with less than 10 volunteers has now grown to have over 200 high school volunteers across Kathmandu, all of them visiting the nearby least-facilitated government schools. I am also a part of British Council's Global Changemakers network and is a core team member of Nepal Ko Yuwa (NKY).

My Venture

Minimally Invasive Education believes that Nepal’s limited investments in education have not been able to bear desired fruits. While we recognize the monotonous classroom environment as well as the obsolete Nepali curriculum of the primary/secondary level as the key problems to educational inefficiency in Nepal, we know that the curricequally imperative to quickly find out other loopull the country out of an education quagmire. 

This was how MIE was born some 1.5 years back. While working to change the curriculum of the primary level of education throughout the country as our long term goal, we devised equally ambitious programs to tackle and change the underlying unattractive and monotonous classroom environment and hence, promote interactive learning environment amongst children of primary school.

While advocating constantly for change in the Nepali curriculum, we also empower youth of college‐going age through our MIE Mentor and Tutor Program. We encourage high school students who study in a relatively good, well‐off high school to form groups and serve as mentors and tutors. We request colleges which are known to be at the Nepali education forefront to take the responsibility of managing a government school for an entire year. We also help the students in government schools (who, in general, come from relatively disadvantaged and least facilitated groups) by introducing series of interesting programs that helps them make their process of getting educated fun‐filled and adventurous. MIE Beyond Classroom Initiative takes these students to places that are described in their text books to encourage a better understanding and gain firsthand knowledge. We seek educational resources for the government schools from international donors.

Now in the second year of the actual implementation MIE our team of mere 30 volunteers has grown to four colleges and over 200 volunteers. We plan to kick off now by involving every high school in Kathmandu into our MIE Mentor and Tutor Program, and gradually move to expanding our projects to other regions in South Asia.