Dipendra KC - Thammasat U: Creating Springboards for Youth in Nepal and Thailand

Social Innovation Asia

In the first episode of the Social Innovation Asia podcast series, Dipendra KC talks with Michael Waitze about his experience founding and running a youth organisation in Nepal, and his role in a new masters degree program of Social Innovation and Sustainability at Thammasat University.

When Dipendra and his friends were seeking work experience as young college students, they kept being asked if they had any experience. In response, they went about building an organisation to give themselves the experience they were missing. They called Yuwa, which simply means youth in Nepali and has the objective of giving young like-minded Nepalese a chance to explore and test their ideas for social change.

It began as an organisation of five unpaid young students with no external capital and became an organisation with 10 full-time staff, 100 active members, funding of four to five hundred thousand US dollars per year while reaching out to 5,000 young Nepalese around the county on an annual basis.

Through Yuwa, Nepalese youth like himself have been able to impact government policy. Dipendra cites the case where members were active in changing national education curriculum to include topics such as sexual reproduction rights and alternate gender identities.

In life after Yuwa, Dipendra is pursuing a PhD and embracing his passion for innovations in development and his fascination with big data. He recently published a paper based on a study approximately 40,000 NGOs in Nepal, which examines the factors determining their location and whether they are positioned where they are really needed.

In his role as a lecture, he brings his experience analyzing big data to his students and tries to open their mind to insights they can gain by using statistical tools to understand economic, social and political change at national and global levels.

At the School of Global Studies, he is also heading up a new Masters of Social Innovation and Sustainability. Dipendra explains how the course will be problem-focused and give students the opportunity to examine problems based on real-world experience and develop solutions in an open, hands-on, and exploratory academic setting.