Pitch a village business, and defend the numbers.
To the people who will actually run it, and who will tell you, kindly, where you got it wrong.
Field education in Nepal · for schools & universities
Learn.
Regenerate.
Belong.
Your students have studied the world. Here, they get to work in it, alongside farmers, makers, film-makers, engineers and elders, on questions that are still open. Where learning meets the ground.
Schools that work with us
American School of Doha Qatar
American School of the Hague Netherlands
École Jeannine Manuel France
Little British School of Lille France
Taipei First Girls' High School Taiwan
Kopila Valley School Nepal
What makes us different
Not a trip.
Not a tour.
Not service-learning.
Real work, with real people, who will judge it. Your students leave having made something a community actually uses, and having been taken seriously while they made it.
What students do here
They don't have to wait to matter.
Young people are often called the leaders of tomorrow. Here they don't have to wait for tomorrow. A sixteen-year-old can already do work that a family will use, a village will judge and a community will remember, and be taken seriously for it.
Premiere a film to the family it is about.
A real deadline, a real audience, and your name on the credits.
Share a stage in a village courtyard.
Song, dance and theatre with Tharu performers and children your own age.
Build a sensor that keeps a household safe.
Camera traps, early-warning alerts and the data behind them, on systems people rely on.
Take a harvest from field to market.
Ethical production, processing, packaging and branding, worked out with the family whose farm it is.
Take a proposal to the ward office.
Then follow what happens to it, which is its own lesson in how decisions get made.
Students can be paired with a local buddy of the same age. Most days, they learn as much from each other as from any of us.
1:8Never fewer than one adult to eight students
16Thematic areas, with programmes tailored from two days to two weeks
24/7Someone awake every night, at every site
2Teachers hosted free with every group
4Grounds, from the Terai to the Annapurnas
20+Years of learning with the same communities
Ways to come
Three days near Kathmandu. Two weeks in the Terai. Or in the Mountains.
Nagarkot · 2–3 days
Short programmes
For Nepali schools year-round, and as part of longer international programmes, ninety minutes from the capital.
Wild Systems LabClimate DetectivesRegenerative EntrepreneurshipThe Storytellers’ CampThe Tech Den+ 3 more
See the eight programmes →
Bardiya · 7–12 days
Extended programmes
For schools from around the world, in a Tharu village on the forest edge.
The Village Enterprise StudioThe Courtyard StageThe Signal LabSoil, Seed & Season+ 4 more
See the eight programmes →
Every programme can be built around your curriculum, whether CAS, IB or your own. Tell us what you need
What teachers say
“They respect our students as partners on this journey.”Bart Dankaerts · CAS and Service Learning Coordinator, American School of the Hague
“The students realised there was no quick fix. Frustration and a 'fail forward' approach made them re-evaluate the dynamics at play.”Rebecca Greenway · Educator, École Jeannine Manuel, France
Our invitation
Please, lend us your young people.
We need their fresh eyes, their curiosity, and the questions only someone from outside thinks to ask.
Within 100 miles, Nepal rises from lush lowland jungle and Tharu farmland, through terraced hills and market towns, to the cloud forests and high villages below Everest and its endless, unlimited horizons.
At Himalaya Living School, we believe a young mind is just as unlimited, and there is nowhere better than Nepal to prove it. For over 20 years we have welcomed students from all walks of life, from schools across Nepal and around the world. Where learning meets the ground.
What they experience here stays with them. Some go on to build businesses, make films, design technology, farm, serve in public life or protect wild places, having learned from the people who live the world's real dilemmas rather than from people who only study them.
That is how a society changes: one person at a time, towards a world where caring for land and community is not the business of a profession, but simply part of how people live. That future belongs to them.
Find your way in
Where would you like to start?
I lead a school
How we partner with schools, year after year, and keep students safe.
Our commitment →
I teach
How learning works on the ground, and the thinking behind it.
How we learn →
I'm a parent
Where they sleep, who is awake at night, who answers the phone.
Your questions →
I'm a student
A day in Bardiya, told by Maya, 16. Peacocks at 05:40.
Maya's day →At a university? We also host field courses, research and long-term collaborations. For universities →
How we learn
Four things the ground teaches.
Craft
Some knowledge lives in a body, not a book. Here, the people who hold it teach.
River
Everything downstream depends on what happens upstream. So does everything you do here.
Home
The test of what you build is whether it is still standing after you have gone.
Harvest
Take what you need. Leave what must grow back. That was the whole of it, before anyone was paid to name it.
Learning grows in the field, where it meets the ground.
From the jungle up to the mountain peaks, young people and educators step into the dilemmas the community lives. Learning here is organic and systemic: it grows out of real situations, and follows the threads that tie people, land, livelihoods and decisions together. Modern education assumes knowledge is formed in a protected space and applied to the world afterwards: curriculum first, consequence later (if at all). It produces people who are fluent in applying existing frameworks, and less practised at questioning them.
Himalaya Living School restores consequence to the centre of learning. Not consequence meaning reward and punishment, but meaning a young person's choices have real effects on people, on businesses, on animals and on changing landscapes, with those effects returning as the lesson itself.
Students might design a solution, present it to the local ward office, and see it through in partnership with Nepali students. The most rigorous learning environments aren't classrooms at all, but living communities working through real problems, where what you learn is used the same day.
The community is our faculty.
Traditional knowledge is a system of practice, not folklore. A student learning to build with bamboo and mud isn't following a worksheet. She's apprenticed to a woman who has built these walls her whole life, whose grandmother built them before her, and whose judgement of 'good enough' comes from decades of watching what stands through a monsoon and what doesn't.
My grandparents taught me forest signs. My teachers call those practices backward. But when NGOs want our stories for donors, suddenly our knowledge is valuable.Laxmi Tharu, 19
So the community does not only teach here. It holds the authority to assess students' work: does this address the real problem, or a more comfortable version of it? Can we actually use it? The right to judge what succeeds sits with the people who will live with the results.
We learn through relationship. A student who has spent three days with a family stops studying an issue and starts caring about it, and that's the point at which learning changes character.
We ask before we answer.
We bring students straight into a real question, with good people beside them but no answer sheet. Give someone the answer before they have felt the question and it only confirms what they already believed. Let them arrive at it knee deep, and it changes how they see everything.
We are not trying to hand over answers. We are trying to help students build better questions, and find the confidence to ask them out loud.
A student chasing a grade is always half elsewhere: one eye on the task, one eye on the result. A student inside a problem is being changed by it while it happens. That is the kind of learning that builds judgement. Facts tell you how. Judgement tells you when, for whom, and to what end.
We don't vanish.
What a student takes away is not a set of facts. It is a mark left on how they think, and it surfaces long after the visit: in what they notice the next time something difficult lands in front of them, what options they can imagine, how they weigh a decision.
So we design for that, with continued contact, return visits and alumni work. We also run a parallel virtual programme, tailored to a school's own curriculum. It can offer what a visit cannot: a Badghar elder explaining a water settlement from his courtyard, a village entrepreneur talking through her accounts, or a former poacher, now a police informant, speaking to students over video.
A day in Bardiya
Told by Maya, 16.
05:40
Woke up to peacocks.
We had to get up really early because the forest doesn't wait. I thought about how it is all just happening anyway whether we are there or not.
06:15
Breakfast on the riverbank. A big male tiger had crossed 20 minutes ago, just 200m away.
Tomorrow I want to get up 20 minutes sooner!
07:00
Walked the camera trap line with Bhadai. My trap had a civet at 2am! I had thought I might get a deer but hadn't really thought carefully about why.
I was wrong about my prediction. The animals mark your work. We can't predict what they will do but we can come up with clear hypotheses.
08:30
Splitting and soaking bamboo with Sita, who has built these walls for forty years. Mine collapsed. Hers didn't.
What works and what is good enough is decided by what survives the monsoon.
10:00
Worked on my project which is sitting with the Chaudhary family and making a ledger for the last year about what living beside elephants actually costs them (e.g. crops, fences).
Today I realised the compensation form asks the wrong things like what the elephant ate. Nobody asks about the stuff that really impacts them like the sleepless nights or their daughter not being able to walk to school alone.
12:30
Lunch, then an hour off. Slept under a tree.
14:00
Bishnu explained to us about the Badghar system, like how a water dispute is settled here without a court.
Found it a bit complicated. It seems like a more sophisticated thing than anything in my politics syllabus.
15:30
Visited the Driftwood Workshop. Asked what it costs to make one piece and how long it takes (4 days). I worked out what they earn per hour.
Four days to make one piece. I'd have guessed an hour. Thought about how tough it is to make a living here and why many young people have to leave.
17:00
Back to my ledger with Ram. He said I'd counted the fence repair once. His family rebuilds theirs twice a year. He was right. He was wrong about the goats.
Being corrected by someone your own age is a cool way to learn stuff! He knew it was wrong because his family lives it.
19:00
Dinner at camp. Then the fire. Someone asked about the compensation scheme and no one in the circle knew so I shared what I found out today.
It felt great to be able to share something I had found out for myself. The best questions are the ones the adults can't answer either!
Our commitment to every student.
You will be welcomed in, not shown around. Into the community, its households and its way of doing things, as a participant, not a visitor. An observer watches and leaves. A participant is part of what happens.
You will be paired with a buddy.
A local student your own age, working alongside you. The start of a conversation that can last a lifetime.
You will design a project and see it through.
Not an exercise with a marked answer, but real work people can use. If it doesn't go to plan, that's part of the learning.
You will learn with real tools.
Cameras and editing kits, farm tools, camera traps and drones, business ledgers, and the methods practitioners actually use here.
You will learn from people at the top of their field.
A community faculty who have lived this landscape for generations, alongside specialists in enterprise, the arts, technology, farming and ecology.
You will find your voice and use it.
In conversations around the fire, where you'll be taken seriously.
You will live the place as it really is, in comfort.
An authentic setting, never a staged one, with well-run camps, clean facilities, good food and the same safety standards at every site.
You will eat real food grown from the earth, breathe clean air, and sleep under real dark.
There will always be someone to talk to.
Day or night, a member of staff you already know, whose job is to make sure you're feeling safe and happy.
Our commitment to every school.
Schools already carry an enormous amount, with remarkable consistency and very little thanks. No school can be expected to bring a living village, a forest edge and a community faculty into its own timetable as well. That is what Himalaya Living School exists to provide, and why we are a natural, almost inevitable, partner: an extension of your school, built with you and built to last, with every year adding trust, shared work and achievements that belong to both of us.
We are your partner.
We are not a travel or logistics fixer for your regular learning trips. We are your partner in making learning the most relevant thing your students do, and in giving them a new identity: as doers. Every programme is designed with your teachers, around your curriculum and your questions, and reshaped after every visit from what both of us learned.
We keep your students safe, and show you how in writing.
Child protection from the first email to the flight home: police-cleared, referenced and trained adults, never a student alone with one adult, and a named safeguarding lead. A written risk assessment for every activity and hazard, from rivers, wildlife and weather to roads and kitchens, and a critical incident plan that names who calls whom. Read the full safety detail
We hold ourselves to a standard of excellence.
Wilderness First Responders on site, procedures reviewed after every programme, and a written report after each visit on what your students did, what they produced, and what did not work.
We map the learning to your curriculum.
CAS, IB or your own framework. We show you where and how each day connects, so the field and the classroom strengthen each other.
We welcome your teachers as colleagues.
Participants, not chaperones. Fully briefed before arrival, two hosted free with every group, and welcome to shape the programme with us.
We grow the partnership year after year.
Return visits, alumni projects, in-school sessions and a virtual programme, so each cohort builds on the work of the one before, and your school and the community share achievements that last.
We are open with you.
About revenue: what is paid to community faculty, what stays in the local economy, and what your visit funded. About flying: most of what we do needs no flights, and for international visits we recommend one longer stay over several short ones.
We work towards something larger, together.
Regenerative learning and regenerative global citizenship are not a week's project. We want to build them with partner schools over many years, contributing together to how young people learn.
What Himalaya Living School is not.
Each of these has something worth keeping, and our programmes keep it. A programme may well include an expedition, a camp, a journey or a piece of service, but only where it is planned with a purpose, never as an end in itself.
Service-learning.
There is no server and no served. A volunteer arrives to help, and leaves. Here, the problems students work on are unresolved for everyone in the room. Students are participants, not saviours.
A tour.
The community are not hosts, guides, entertainment or exhibits. They are the faculty: named, contracted and paid to teach what they know. The people who live with a question understand it best, so they teach.
A science expedition.
We don’t observe the field, we live in it. Students weave, build, farm, film, perform and cook alongside the people who have always called this place home, learning with their hands as well as through a lens.
A trip.
A trip ends when you leave. Here, the work carries on without you, and whether it holds is the mark you get. If a system doesn't survive the monsoon, or an enterprise has fizzled out after 18 months, we learn from that together.
A nature camp.
Life was never divided into separate boxes, and neither should learning be. Enterprise, the arts, technology, farming, water, governance, health, wildlife and inherited knowledge are equal subjects. At the centre is community: the people who hold every thread in their hands.
A campus.
We do have long-established learning sites across Nepal, but Himalaya Living School happens in the community and landscape, not the buildings.
What we learn
Sixteen thematic areas and an array of tailored programmes, each shaped by its landscape.
Short programmes near Kathmandu for Nepali schools, and longer, deeper ones in Bardiya, the Annapurna Region and Nagarkot for international schools from around the world. Every one can be adapted to complement your curriculum, but in our ‘Living’ way.
Nagarkot · 2–3 days
Residential programmes at Noumenal Camps on the Kathmandu valley rim, ninety minutes from the capital, run year-round for Nepali schools, and as part of longer programmes for international schools.
The Wild Systems Lab
Wire up a forest overnight, then work out whether you can trust what it tells you. Leave with a map of the landscape built from your own evidence.
Climate Detectives
Measure a spring with a stopwatch. Ask a farmer what the winters used to be like. Set what he knows beside a century of records, and reach a verdict you can defend.
Leadership in the Wild
Learn to navigate, read risk and hold a team together, then take the lead, with the adults following and quiet unless something is unsafe.
Regenerative Entrepreneurship
Walk a village looking for the money leaking out of it, then design a business to plug the gap. Real numbers, defended to a panel of local people.
The Makers’ Camp
Build with bamboo and mud alongside people who have done it their whole lives, and find out why it works. Add a signed piece to a structure that will outlast you.
The Storytellers’ Camp
Film, photograph, write or perform, against a real deadline, then premiere it to the people whose story it tells.
Regenerative Farm Enterprise
Help build a regenerative farm and learn its foundational disciplines, then follow the harvest all the way to market: ethical production, processing, packaging, branding and distribution. Leave understanding a farm as a living micro-economy.
Working on replica production of a fault-finder for an electric fenceThe Tech Den, with a Real Purpose
Design, build and test tools a village actually needs, from fence fault-finders to early-warning sensors, alongside the people who will rely on them. Leave having made something that works in the field, not just on the bench.
Built around you
Every programme bends to your curriculum and your questions. Tell us what your students need, and we’ll shape the days around it.
Bardiya · 7–12 days
Extended programmes in Dalla Village and the Bardiya buffer zone, built with the community for international and Nepali schools. Each theme is shaped with your school before you arrive; ask us for the full outline.
The Village Enterprise Studio
Find the leak, build the business, defend the numbers.
Stories from the Longhouse
Film, photography and a premiere for the people in it.
The Courtyard Stage
Theatre, song and dance made with Tharu performers.
The Signal Lab
Sensors, alerts and data for a village that relies on them.
Soil, Seed & Season
A Tharu farm calendar, from seed saving to harvest.
The Badghar Commons
How a village shares water and land, and settles disputes, without a court.
River People
The Karnali, its fishers, and everything downstream.
Living with Giants
Elephants, tigers and farms, seen from both sides of the fence.
Real work students can join
Alongside the programmes, there is always work already under way that students can be part of.
EnterpriseLaunching village ventures with the people who will run them, from the Driftwood Workshop to a community nursery.
Film & storyDocumenting, with families, what daily life beside the forest really involves.
TechnologyPrototyping tools at the Community Centre for Conservation Technology, and the early-warning network on the forest edge.
FarmingTurning elders’ planting and flowering calendars into a living record of a changing climate.
GovernancePreparing proposals with young people for the ward office and the buffer-zone committee.
WildlifeBuilding and checking nest cavities for hornbills, and camera-trap surveys with local naturalists.
Where we learn
Four grounds, one school.
Dalla Village · Bardiya · Western Terai
Bardiya
Sal forest and elephant grass, the Karnali running out of the mountains, and Tharu villages with farms, workshops and their own centuries-old self-government. A proto-world: almost every question of this century, from food and water to enterprise, governance and coexistence with wildlife, present in miniature, at a scale you can walk across in a morning.
TIME World's Greatest Places 2024 · Burhan Wilderness Camps
Nagarkot · Bhaktapur · Valley Rim
Nagarkot
Ninety minutes from the capital and a world away. Terraced hills, pine forest and Tamang farming villages whose springs run lower each year, with pangolin burrows in the scrub behind the houses. Students stay under canvas at Noumenal Camps, with the Himalaya across the valley at dawn.
2–3 day programmes · year-round
Annapurna Region · Gandaki Province
Annapurna Region
Terraced villages on the trails below the Annapurnas, where farming, trekking tourism, migration and a changing climate meet on the same hillside. Students learn from the families who farm the slopes and keep the trails: mountain livelihoods, enterprise and ecology, where the road runs out and decisions made in Kathmandu arrive last.
Mountain programmes · on request
Anywhere the question lives
Mobile Camp
Tents and kit that travel anywhere. When a question belongs somewhere else, such as a river under dispute, a village facing a new road, or a craft with one last master, we take the school to it, and learn alongside the people who live there.
Goes to the groundWhere they sleep, what they eat
Established places, familiar faces.
Students stay at sites we have run for years, with people who know them by name. Nothing is improvised.
Bardiya · Dalla Village, Western Terai
Bardiya
- Burhan Wilderness Camps
- Our own community tourism enterprise and the base for Bardiya programmes. Named by TIME one of the World’s Greatest Places, 2024.
- Angna Ghar
- A community-run Tharu longhouse, where students see the rhythm of a Tharu household up close, operated to the same standards as our camps.
Nagarkot · Kathmandu valley rim
Nagarkot
- Noumenal Camps
- Under canvas on the valley rim, with the Himalaya across the valley at dawn. Our short programmes run here year-round.
- Siranchaur Camp
- Our camping ground in the hills north-east of Kathmandu, run by the Nagarkot team, for larger groups and single nights.
Grown nearby, cooked and eaten together.
Three cooked meals a day at one long table with the staff and the community faculty. Dal bhat, seasonal vegetables, eggs and fruit, most of it grown within a few kilometres, much of it on the farms students work on.
Single-sex sleeping areas
Someone awake every night
Treated drinking water
Inspected kitchens
Dietary & allergy needs met
Same standards at every site
Why we do this
Because the world doesn't come in subjects.
Because a living community holds every subject at once
Spend a week in one Tharu village and you meet a whole curriculum. An economy: what a basket, a buffalo or a homestay night is really worth. An art: songs, dances, stories and courtyard theatre that have carried knowledge for centuries. A technology: from the bamboo wall that survives the monsoon to the alert that warns a household when elephants come close.
A farm: seed, soil and a planting calendar elders read from the trees. A government: the Badghar system, which settles a water dispute without a court. And yes, a forest full of wildlife.
A school divides these into separate periods with a bell between them. The village never did. Neither do we.
Because the problem is never where we are looking
We notice the problems that announce themselves: a species in trouble, a failed harvest, a shop that closes. The causes rarely do. A young weaver leaves the village not because nobody wants baskets, but because nobody has worked out what four days of her work is worth. Soil tires one fertiliser bag at a time. A pangolin disappears in the margin of a farmer's field, where a road has been cut and the market has crept a little closer.
None of it looks like a threat. It looks like people, reasonably, wanting a better life. And when we fix on one thing, we often make the rest worse. Bardiya's tigers were brought back from almost nothing, a real achievement, paid for by families who lost crops, livestock and sometimes more, and who were rarely counted in the arithmetic of it.
We were labelled poachers for living as we always had. Our knowledge of the forest was erased, yet we're now asked to protect it.Jagannath Yogi
We're told to coexist with wildlife, but coexistence requires support. We feel abandoned.Purnima Tharu
A farm, a business, a forest, a household, a story: none of them is a separate problem. What we chase at the level of one is usually only the symptom.
Because we turned care into a profession
Looking after the land and each other used to be part of making a living. The fisher left enough fish to breed. The field was laid fallow so the soil could recover. Neighbours rebuilt each other's houses after the flood. Nobody was paid for it; it was how you kept a place worth living in.
Now much of it is a profession, in development, in aid, in conservation. Money is released for a problem, and it pays for projects that exist only while the problem does. Nobody chose this, and nobody is rewarded for finishing. It is like a doctor paid for every appointment but nothing for a cure. All real work, by committed people, and meanwhile the causes the community named decades ago go unaddressed. We are milking hard into a pail full of holes.
They build fences, take photos, then leave. We're their success stories until the cameras are gone.Raju Tharu, farmer at Kailashi
The prize is not a bigger profession. It is the day the farmer, the engineer, the artist, the planner and the shopkeeper all do this work as a matter of course.
Because we teach children to close questions, not open them
Why does the same mistake repeat, generation after generation? Because we keep producing the same kind of person. School into degree into master's into doctorate rewards mastering a framework over knowing a place, and spends far more of a young life at a laptop than out among people.
We have taught children that learning means closing a question: a debt settled by the right answer. It is efficient. It is also, very often, forgetting dressed up as knowing.
Education is not the delivery of answers. It is waking a hunger to understand, and the capacity to stand inside a hard problem without needing it to be simpler than it is. Young people are ready for that far sooner than we usually allow.
Voices from the campfire
What some of our students and teachers have taken home from their time here.
“I came hoping to learn about pangolin conservation. What I left with was a reflection on how ignorant I am.”
Albert Hsu · Student, Taiwan
“The resilience of the local people and local lives alone can teach us so much.”
Michelle Li · Class 12
“The best way to find solutions is to work together instead of doing what is best for us as individuals.”
Student · École Jeannine Manuel, France
“They respect our students as partners on this journey.”
Bart Dankaerts · CAS and Service Learning Coordinator, American School of the Hague
“The students realised there was no quick fix. Frustration and a 'fail forward' approach made them re-evaluate the dynamics at play.”
Rebecca Greenway · Educator, École Jeannine Manuel, France
“We don't teach solutions. We create spaces where students and communities unlearn together.”
Manoj Gautam · Founder
Who looks after your students
Six questions every parent asks.
Sending a young person far from home is a big decision. Here are the plain answers, before the philosophy. Every one is written down, reviewed after each programme, and yours to read in full.
Where do they sleep?
At established sites we have run for years, in single-sex sleeping areas, with staff close by. See where
What do they eat?
Three cooked meals a day, grown nearby, from inspected kitchens, with dietary and allergy needs met.
Who is awake at night?
Someone, every night, at every site.
What if someone is hurt?
A Wilderness First Responder is always on site, and every route out is timed in hours.
Who do they learn from?
A named, contracted community faculty, with our facilitators and visiting specialists, and never fewer than one adult to eight students.
Who is accountable?
People with names, who answer the phone. Meet them
Keeping your students safeRatios, vetting, supervision and plans for when things go wrong
- A facilitator-to-student ratio of at least 1:8, and tighter on water, in forest and after dark.
- Every adult in contact with students holds a current Nepal Police Clearance Certificate, two written references, a documented interview, and an annual safeguarding briefing.
- A policy of never leaving a student alone with a single adult.
- A named safeguarding lead, a deputy on site, and waking supervision overnight.
- A written risk assessment for every activity.
- A critical incident plan naming who calls you, who calls the parents, and in what order.
- Vehicle and driver standards, including limits on driving hours.
- A living set of standard operating procedures, reviewed after every programme.
First aid and evacuationWho responds, what they carry, and how quickly help arrives
- At least one Wilderness First Responder on site at all times, and every facilitator holding current Wilderness First Aid as a minimum, certified by an internationally recognised provider and renewed every two years.
- A comprehensive medical kit at camp and a field kit on every activity.
- Medical and allergy information collected before arrival, held by a named member of staff, and known to every facilitator.
- Prescription medication stored securely and given by a named member of staff.
- Evacuation routes and timings from each site stated in hours, with a vehicle on standby throughout and helicopter arrangements under a named authoriser.
- Public liability insurance in place, with the figure disclosed to you before you commit.
Schools: what we commit to as your partner is on the HOW page. Our commitment to every school
The full policy documents are yours to read before you decide. Message us for our full Operational and Safety Protocol documents. Send us the questions your parents are asking, and we will answer them in writing. Ask us anything
Our team
Vision, operations and the faculty.
One vision, carried by an operations team that makes every visit safe and seamless, and a faculty drawn from educators, specialists and the communities themselves.
Founder & Director
Manoj Gautam
Founder & Director
A dynamic leader across indigenous rights, conservation, community enterprise, technology and education. Explorers Club 50 Indigenous Rights Champion, Future for Nature Award 2015, Jane Goodall’s representative in South Asia for two decades, and twenty years of experiential learning.
Read full profile →Invite Manoj to speak
Operations
Dakshina KhadkaOperations LeadProfile →
Anmol AcharyaSchool LiaisonProfile →
Rojit Jung KarkiFilm, Media & DocumentationProfile →Care
Niraj GautamHead of Student ExperienceProfile →
Sarah VallentineAdvisor & Safeguarding LeadSubject Experts
Sebita AdhikariDrama & Expressive Arts LeadProfile →
Madindra AryalTech InstructorProfile →
Arun Rimal, P.E.Structural Engineer, Green BuildingProfile →
Hikmat AcharyaTech Journalism & Digital SafetyProfile →Community Faculty
Bandana TharuProfile →
Biru ChaudharyProfile →
Dinesh AcharyaProfile →
Gopal SunarProfile →
Hemanta AcharyaChairman, Buffer Zone Management CouncilProfile →
Harkali TharuniProfile →
Jagannath YogiProfile →
Manju MahataraProfile →
Ram Raj Dhakal (Nana)Profile →
Narayan ChaudharyProfile →
Nisha TharuProfile →
Sonia TharuProfile →
Sushila MahataraProfile →Manoj Gautam
Founder & Director
A dynamic leader whose work reaches across many of the defining questions of today’s global society: indigenous rights and community agency, conservation and animal protection, regenerative enterprise, technology, and how young people learn. Named an Indigenous Rights Champion in the Explorers Club 50, Manoj is known for community-based approaches to conservation, fearless advocacy and compelling storytelling. Nicknamed ‘Nomad’, he works with six ethnic communities across Nepal, from the Terai to the mountains, helping revive traditional institutions and knowledge so that communities hold real agency over the decisions that shape their lives.
Why Himalaya Living School
Himalaya Living School grew out of Manoj’s own observation of where contemporary experiential and outdoor learning falls short: too often a trip, a tour or a service project that leaves the place unchanged and the student only briefly moved. He set out to build something elaborate in its reach yet straightforward in its purpose.
His work can look like many different things, but in essence each is a component of the same belief. Himalaya Living School is where they all dovetail: a commitment to raising the next generation of compassionate, empathetic, resourceful, solutionary and charged regenerative global citizens.
Twenty years of experiential learning
Manoj has spent twenty years bringing young people into real places and real questions, through three generations of the same idea:
- Himalayan Voluntourism
- Schools for Sustainable Development Goals
- Himalaya Living School, today
Along the way he has hosted school groups from around the world, including UNIS New York, UWC Singapore, IICS, and ENKA Schools and Şişli Terakki in Istanbul, and built the community-as-faculty model the school now runs on.
New YorkSwitzerlandSingaporeIstanbulShanghaiHong KongTaiwanThailandKazakhstanDubaiQatarFranceNetherlandsUnited KingdomCanadaAustraliaNepaland more
Community, rights & conservation
- Works with six ethnic communities across Nepal to revive traditional institutions, knowledge and self-governance
- Helped start a wave of youth-led conservation organisations, and used legal and policy routes to win new protections
- Founder & Executive Director, Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF)
- Founder, Initiative for the Agency of Community over Conservation (IACC)
- Founder, Community Centre for Conservation Technology
- Founder, Burhan Wilderness Camps and Noumenal Camps
- Created Nepal’s first vulture restaurant with the community of Basa Basahi (2005)
Jane Goodall & Roots and Shoots
- Jane Goodall’s representative in South Asia for twenty years
- Founder, Jane Goodall Institute Nepal
- Roots and Shoots, Jane Goodall’s youth programme, in Nepal
Awards & recognition
- Explorers Club 50, Class of 2023: Indigenous Rights Champion
- Future for Nature Award, 2015
- Burhan Wilderness Camps: TIME World’s Greatest Places, 2024
- His vulture work features in Jane Goodall’s Hope for Animals and Their Habitat
Memberships & panels
- Honorary Member, ICCA — International Consortium on Indigenous and Local Community Conserved Areas
- Expert Panel, Human Behaviour Change for Life (HBCL)
- Member, Sustainability Committee, Skål International Nepal
- Founding member, Animal Welfare Network Nepal
Keynotes & talks
- Keynote, 2nd ENKA Conference on Experiential and Outdoor Learning, Istanbul, 2025
- Keynote, Belum International Rainforest Summit, Perak, Malaysia, 2016
- Keynote, Human Behaviour Change for Animals conference, Dorking, UK, 2016 (watch)
- “One Welfare, One Health”, ISAZ
- Writes on conservation, community agency and how young people learn in Nepal’s mainstream press, including Republica, and on his Substack, Truth for Regeneration
Conferences hosted
- Conservation Asia Congress, Kathmandu, 2026
- Himalayan Summit on Experiential and Service Learning, Nagarkot, 2019
- Asia for Animals Conference, Kathmandu, 2017
- International Workshop on Human-Wildlife Conflict Management, 2015
- International Seminar on Humane Animal Management in South Asia, 2012
Education
- MSc, University of Oxford
- Languages: Nepali, English, Tharu
Invite Manoj to speak
Available for lectures, keynotes, school assemblies and talks, in person or online, on experiential and regenerative learning, community agency, conservation and human behaviour change.
Dakshina Khadka
Operations Lead
Dakshina runs operations at Himalaya Living School: the logistics, the people and the plans that make every visit safe and seamless, from the first itinerary to the last vehicle home.
She is also a photographer, event planner and trip organiser: an all-round fixer who makes the complicated look easy. A role model to many young women and an avid humanitarian, she brings the same care to people as she does to plans. See more of her work at dakshinakhadka.com.
Anmol Acharya
School Liaison
Anmol is the first person most schools speak to, and the main point of contact for school partnerships. He works with teachers and coordinators from the first enquiry to the return home, shaping each visit around what a school needs.
Having studied at Kathmandu University, he brings an interest in technology, AI and data to how the school plans and follows up on its programmes. Anmol on LinkedIn
Write to him at anmol@himalayalivingschool.org.
Hemanta Acharya
Chairman, Buffer Zone Management Council
Hemanta Acharya is a conservationist, community leader and Chairman of the Bardia National Park Buffer Zone Management Council, best known for his work on wildlife protection and human-wildlife coexistence around the park. After losing his father to a wild elephant in 2010, he chose to turn his grief into action for the landscape, not into resentment.
As co-founder and past chair of the Community-Based Anti-Poaching Unit (CBAPU) in Bardia, he has spent years mobilising local young people to patrol forests, prevent poaching and reduce conflict between villagers and large predators. On the Buffer Zone Council he presses for practical legal reforms that balance the protection of critical ecosystems with the livelihoods of the people who live beside them. He is also a key figure behind the Tiger Track Eco Lodge, which joins sustainable tourism with community resilience and a support fund for victims of wildlife attacks.
At Himalaya Living School he helps students connect the local dots: the political ecology of the place, and what moves a community — its motivations, its aspirations, and how it organises itself to act.
Sushila Mahatara
Community Faculty · Senior Safari Guide & Photographer
Sushila Mahatara (often known as Sushila Mahatara Chhetri) is a pioneering senior safari guide, photographer and wildlife conservationist, celebrated as one of the “queens of the jungle” of Bardia National Park. The eldest of seven sisters, she broke deep gender barriers in the early 2000s by training as the first female nature guide in the region, starting as a volunteer with the community anti-poaching unit at a time of political instability.
With her sisters Manju and Ranju, she gained global recognition as a lead tracker and drone operator for the BBC Earth documentary Tiger Island, where their tracking helped reveal never-before-seen cooperative behaviour among Royal Bengal tigers.
Working with Burhan Wilderness Camps, she uses her photography, community education programmes and international platform to inspire the next generation of young conservation leaders across the Himalaya.
Manju Mahatara
Community Faculty · Senior Safari Guide & Wildlife Photographer
Manju Mahatara is a trailblazing wildlife photographer, senior safari guide and conservationist, renowned as one of the leading female naturalists in Bardia National Park. Breaking through deeply entrenched gender barriers in a field long dominated by men, she and her sisters became pioneering female tiger trackers.
She holds a record for the most tiger sightings in the park, and has worked as a primary tracker and drone operator for world-renowned wildlife documentaries, including the BBC’s Tiger Island. Working with Burhan Wilderness Camps, she uses technology such as drones for anti-poaching and to reduce conflict between people and wildlife.
Her photography is its own form of advocacy, for community-led conservation and for women’s empowerment. Her advice to young women who want to follow her is simple: courage matters more than resources. Her story in The Kathmandu Post
Madindra Aryal
Tech Instructor
Madindra Aryal is a prominent Nepali electronics engineer, innovator and tech entrepreneur, recognised for his contributions to hardware engineering, the Internet of Things and robotics. An alumnus of Khwopa Engineering College, he first gained international attention for inventing “Nepal’s Light”, a solar-powered portable power source built to help remote and disaster-struck communities after the 2015 earthquake.
Driven to use embedded systems and telecommunications for social good, he served as CEO of Electronic Lab Nepal, and during the COVID-19 pandemic invented an IoT-controlled portable ventilator built from an Ambu bag, to support emergency healthcare in remote areas.
From custom drones and wireless protocols (ZigBee and RF) to Java programming, he moves easily between hardware and software. At Himalaya Living School he brings that range to students as a tech leader and EdTech curriculum expert, showing them what technology can do when it is built for a real need. Madindra on LinkedIn
Sebita Adhikari
Drama & Expressive Arts Lead
Sebita Adhikari is a rising Nepali actress, performing artist, theatre builder and acting coach, celebrated for blending socially conscious storytelling with artistic experimentation. She honed her craft at Theatre Mall in Kathmandu and became a core part of the new wave of performers through the Katha Ghera theatre collective.
Moving easily between stage and screen, she has performed in acclaimed productions such as Katha Ghera’s female-led adaptation of Animal Farm, and in films including Mahanagar (2023), The Shameless (2024) and Abhimanyu Chapter 1. Behind the camera she works as an assistant and second-unit director, championing originality and rigorous professionalism across drama and cinema.
At Himalaya Living School she leads drama and expressive arts, helping students find their voice, often on a village courtyard stage alongside local performers and children their own age.
Arun Rimal, P.E.
Structural Engineer & Green Building Expert
Arun Rimal is a licensed structural engineer and a pioneering figure in eco-friendly construction. An alumnus of Columbia University, where he also served as an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), he bridges decades of global commercial experience with a deep commitment to sustainable development in the Global South.
In 2015 he co-founded Sustainable Future Nepal, a green enterprise dedicated to cutting the construction industry’s carbon footprint through innovative, climate-resilient technologies. Working alongside the design practice Building Bureau, he provides technical leadership on major humanitarian and ecological architecture projects, including the acclaimed low-carbon rammed-earth design of the Tiger Track Eco Lodge in Bardiya, the seismic-resistant reconstruction of rural schools destroyed by the 2015 earthquake, and remote medical facilities such as the Ekuwa Health Post.
By marrying advanced structural engineering with traditional, locally sourced materials such as rammed earth, timber-laced stone masonry and stabilised mud, Arun and his partners continue to redefine green architecture, proving that technical excellence, civic use and environmental harmony can sit together.
Arun is a co-founder of Bankaiya Regeneratives. At Himalaya Living School he advises on and supervises the school’s programmes, bringing an engineer’s rigour to how each one is designed and delivered, and showing students how buildings that last can be made from the ground they stand on.
Harkali Tharuni
Community Faculty · Angna Ghar
Harkali Tharuni is a cultural ambassador and leader at Angna Ghar in Bardiya, a community-run Tharu longhouse and retreat dedicated to preserving indigenous heritage. Working in close partnership with Burhan Wilderness Camps, she plays a central role in celebrating and safeguarding Tharu identity, food, music and art.
Through her leadership at Angna Ghar, Harkali empowers local women, champions community-led conservation along Bardiya’s tiger corridors, and gives visitors from around the world an authentic look at the deep, resilient connection between the Tharu people and their land.
For students, she opens the doors of Angna Ghar: its kitchen, its songs and its way of life.
Ram Raj Dhakal ‘Nana’
Community Faculty · Field Technician & Safari Guide
Ram Raj Dhakal, known to almost everyone as “Nana” (and sometimes Lila), is a versatile conservationist, safari expert and technical coordinator based near Bardia National Park. A key member of the Community-Based Anti-Poaching Unit (CBAPU) and the local Rapid Response Team (RRT), he works at the front line of human-wildlife conflict.
He is celebrated for his inventive use of technology, such as flying buzzing drones that mimic bee swarms to herd wild elephants safely away from farming villages at night.
Beyond emergency response, Nana is a multi-talented field technician and an expert jeep safari guide for Burhan Wilderness Camps, setting up camera traps to monitor tigers, maintaining wildlife water holes and navigating remote jungle trails.
Narayan Chaudhary
Community Faculty · Nature Guide & Conservationist
Narayan Chaudhary is an experienced nature guide, wildlife data collector and dedicated conservationist based in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park. As an active member of the Community Conservation Crisis Group, he stands at the front line of crisis response, stepping in during critical encounters between people and wildlife to protect both villagers and endangered predators.
Representing the Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF), he works to build genuine community agency in conservation, helping local people set up and sustain pro-conservation enterprises so that those who live beside the park lead, and benefit from, the region’s biodiversity.
Biru Chaudhary
Community Faculty · Nature Guide & Youth Educator
Biru Chaudhary is a nature guide, youth educator and conservation practitioner based in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park. As a member of the Community Conservation Crisis Group, he helps manage human-wildlife conflict as it happens, protecting both local livelihoods and wildlife.
On behalf of the Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF), he works towards community agency in conservation practice, helping local people develop and sustain pro-conservation enterprises that offer alternative livelihoods. His grassroots environmental work also includes past engagement with organisations such as WWF, running educational programmes for local young people on the links between community health, population and the environment.
Sonia Tharu
Community Faculty · Educator & Craft Entrepreneur
Sonia Tharu is a young educator, community mobiliser and grassroots advocate from Bardia, and a driving force for local economic empowerment and cultural preservation. Through a cooperative model, she leads a thriving handicraft enterprise that turns sustainable, locally sourced materials into traditional Tharu crafts.
With the Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF), she designs and runs skills-based training for indigenous women and young people, giving them the tools to build alternative livelihoods. Combining hands-on learning at Himalaya Living School with pro-conservation enterprise, she champions women’s financial independence, young people’s civic participation and the preservation of indigenous heritage across the Bardia buffer zone.
Bandana Tharu
Community Faculty · First Responder, Human-Wildlife Conflict
Bandana Tharu is a pioneering grassroots conservationist from Madhuwan, Bardia, and the first woman to work full time as a first responder to human-wildlife conflict there. In one of the country’s highest-conflict buffer zones, she is a member of the Community Conservation Crisis Group (CCCG), stepping onto the front line to manage live wildlife encounters and keep people safe.
With the Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF), and alongside cultural initiatives such as Angna Ghar, she leads the careful documentation of conflict incidents and helps affected families through government relief and compensation claims, so support reaches them quickly.
Through her work with local mechanisms and the Initiative for the Agency of Community over Conservation (IACC), she bridges institutional wildlife protection and indigenous community rights, and is building strong female leadership in a demanding field.
Nisha Tharu
Community Faculty · First Responder & Economics Student
Nisha Tharu is a conservationist, economics student and member of the Community Conservation Crisis Group (CCCG) in Bardia. Balancing her studies with frontline environmental action, she is a first responder specialising in wildlife rescue and in reducing conflict between people and wildlife.
For the Initiative for the Agency of Community over Conservation (IACC), she documents conflict incidents and helps families through government compensation claims so that relief reaches them on time. She also brings her economics training to the development of local pro-conservation enterprises, linking the financial resilience of families with community-led wildlife protection across the Bardia buffer zone.
Jagannath Yogi
Community Faculty · Sustainable Agriculture & Livelihoods
Jagannath Yogi is a veteran community leader and a pioneer of sustainable agriculture in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park. For many years he ran the Suryapatuwa cooperative, piloting alternative livelihoods designed to reduce the community’s dependence on the forest and protect local biodiversity.
He led the cultivation and processing of essential-oil crops such as mentha, spearmint and chamomile, working through the hard realities of market access, fluctuating prices and wildlife raiding the crops. Those years left him with a wealth of bittersweet experience that few people in the landscape can match.
Jagannath also played a pivotal role in the early development and success of the Dalla Homestay, one of the pioneers of community-based eco-tourism in Bardia, linking the economic resilience of local families directly with the protection of nature.
Gopal Sunar
Community Faculty · Crisis Group First Responder
Gopal Sunar is a frontline conservationist and member of the Community Conservation Crisis Group (CCCG) in Bardia. As a first responder he works where people and wildlife meet, and takes particular care in logging detailed reports of every conflict incident so that each one is accurately documented.
His specialised training covers the whole range of crisis work, from handling wildlife during emergency rescues to leading large awareness campaigns that help villages live safely alongside tigers, leopards, elephants and other large animals. In this way he connects technical wildlife management with grassroots awareness, protecting both the livelihoods of Bardia’s families and the endangered species they share the landscape with.
Dinesh Acharya
Community Faculty · Community Liaison
Dinesh Acharya is a dynamic young member of the Community-Based Anti-Poaching Unit (CBAPU) in Bardia and the community liaison for Burhan Wilderness Camps.
He sits at the centre of coordination between government agencies, the community, the private sector and conservation bodies, keeping the many people and organisations involved in the landscape working together.
Hikmat Acharya
Subject Expert · Tech Journalism & Digital Safety
Hikmat Acharya is an investigative tech journalist, researcher and storyteller from Bardia, known for mapping the darker corners of Nepal’s digital space. As an investigator and correspondent for TechPana, he specialises in technology-focused investigations into cybercrime, online scams, data breaches and algorithm-driven misinformation.
Beyond reporting, Hikmat is committed to the rule of law and to digital safety, using narrative storytelling to expose systemic weaknesses and to help the public understand data justice. His background also joins digital accountability with environmental awareness: he was previously a managing partner of WildNepal, a conservation-focused platform in his home district of Bardia.
Rojit Jung Karki
Operations · Film, Media & Documentation
Rojit Jung Karki is a filmmaker, digital creator and visual documentarian whose work joins creative media with community-led conservation and experiential travel in Nepal. He brings together documentation, project facilitation, wildlife photography and drone operation, and has filmed widely in Bardia National Park alongside Burhan Wilderness Camps, publishing under his own banner, Mero Travel Experience.
At Himalaya Living School, Rojit documents programmes as they unfold, so that schools, parents and students leave with a real record of what they did and who they did it with. For students drawn to the film and media strand, he is the person beside them in the field: framing a shot, flying a drone responsibly, interviewing a farmer or a ranger, and editing their own footage into a story worth sharing.
His films show the relationship between indigenous communities and the wild places they live beside, and help put community-driven conservation on the global map. That is the same lens he offers students: the camera as a way to listen closely, and to tell other people’s stories with care.
Niraj Gautam
Care · Head of Student Experience
Niraj Gautam is a Nepalese environmentalist, animal welfare advocate and social worker whose career joins grassroots community development with wildlife conservation. Grounded in his degree in Social Work, he is a Board Member of the Jane Goodall Institute Nepal (JGIN) and has been closely involved with its flagship youth programme, Roots & Shoots Nepal, leading hands-on local environmental initiatives.
He is one of the country’s leading legal voices for animal welfare. He co-filed the historic public interest litigation, and the contempt motions that followed, which led to landmark Supreme Court directives to phase out mass animal sacrifice and to restrict mass culling as a means of population management.
Niraj is also a Board Member of the Burhan Community Regeneration and Conservation Foundation (BCRCF) in Bardiya, where he works directly on human-wildlife coexistence, indigenous community empowerment and environmental education. At Himalaya Living School he is Head of Student Experience.
Our partners & network
We keep good company.
Partner schools
American School of Doha
American School of the Hague
Little British School of Lille
École Jeannine Manuel
Taipei First Girls' High School
Kopila Valley School
On the ground
BCRCF
Burhan Wilderness Camps
Angna Ghar
Noumenal Camps
The Lapsi Tree Resort
Deumadi Cottage
Community Centre for Conservation Technology
Bardiya National Park Buffer Zone Management Committee
Elephant Protection Group
The Driftwood Workshop
Community Based Anti-Poaching Unit
Rapid Response Team
For universities
Your discipline, on living ground.
Himalaya Living School welcomes faculty, researchers and university students. For many years we have hosted university groups, among them students from PSL University in Paris, in landscapes where conservation, culture, climate and livelihoods meet every day. We co-design field courses, host research and build long-term collaborations, alongside the communities who live there.
- Terai to high Himalaya within 100 miles
- Community faculty of practitioners
- 20+ years hosting international groups
- Bardiya · Nagarkot · Annapurna
Fields of study
Where your questions are already being asked.
A starting map, not a fixed menu. Each field is anchored in a place and in people already doing the work, so your students and researchers arrive at a question that is still open.
Political Ecology
Who decides what a forest is for? Buffer-zone politics, compensation, access and power, seen from the households who live with the consequences.
Deep Ecology
Slow, reflective fieldwork in the hills and mountains: belonging to a place, and how worldviews shape what people choose to protect.
Natural Resource Management & Governance
Community forests, buffer-zone councils and user groups. Sit in on real decisions, and follow them through.
Climate & Ecological Monitoring
Camera traps, water holes, river and forest plots, and drones, contributing to monitoring that feeds local decisions.
Conservation Technology
Early-warning systems, electric-fence fault-finders, sensors and drones, designed and repaired with the Community Centre for Conservation Technology.
Conservation Medicine & One Health
Wildlife rescue, livestock and human health at the forest edge, with the first responders who are called when people and animals collide.
Regenerative Design & Building
Low-carbon structures, local materials and green building, with structural engineers and the village crews who build them.
Indigenous Rights & Cultural Regeneration
Tharu knowledge, language, land and identity, and the work of communities reclaiming their agency in conservation.
Human–Wildlife Coexistence
Tigers, elephants and leopards beside farms and homes: incident data, mitigation, compensation and community response.
Regenerative Livelihoods & Community Enterprise
Essential-oil crops, homestays, craft workshops and farm enterprise: what works, what fails, and why.
Environmental Journalism & Visual Storytelling
Investigative reporting, documentary and drone filming, with practitioners who put local stories on the global map.
Experiential & Outdoor Education
For education faculties: how learning works on the ground, and how schools and communities build it together.
Not seeing your field? Anthropology, public health, development studies, engineering and business schools all find their way here. Tell us your question and we will find where it lives.
Ways to work together
From a single field course to a partnership of many years.
Every collaboration is shaped with you from the first conversation. These are the forms it most often takes, and we are open to any other that makes the work happen.
Faculty-led field courses
One to four weeks, co-designed with your faculty around your learning outcomes, and built to carry credit where you need it to.
Study abroad & semester modules
Longer residencies that combine coursework, fieldwork and a project a community will actually use.
Research placements & dissertations
Master’s and doctoral fieldwork, with local introductions, interpreters, field logistics and safe accommodation.
Joint research & long-term monitoring
Multi-year collaborations, shared datasets and publications that credit community knowledge.
Internships & practicums
Placements with our conservation, enterprise, technology and media teams on the ground.
Summer schools & convenings
Gatherings that bring academics, practitioners and communities into the same room, and the same field.
Our commitment to every university.
We co-design.
Your learning outcomes and research questions shape the programme from the first conversation, and we reshape it after every visit from what both of us learned.
We open doors.
Introductions to communities, councils, practitioners and organisations that would take years to reach alone, with people who can translate both the language and the context.
We look after people.
The same safeguarding, risk management and operational standards we keep for every school group, adapted for adult learners and researchers. Message us for our full Operational and Safety Protocol documents.
We make research return.
Communities here are partners in research. We agree consent with them, share findings back in their own language, and make sure their knowledge is credited.
Tell us your discipline, your question and your timeframe. We will come back with a shape for it, and the people who can make it real.
Email us about a partnership →
Join us.
The classroom is not the only place a young person learns. It is just the one we built.
Come and see the other one, where learning meets the ground.