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In our most confident days in Kathmandu, my friend and I like to introduce ourselves as entrepreneurs. We run small businesses, he runs a makeup studio with his girlfriend and I run an education company online while I complete my masters degree. Our companies do fairly enough or we scrape by depending on when you ask us. But we did not go to the US, Europe or Australia and listened to our optimism, agreeing that it might be possible to find a future where we were and at our age.
If one were to listen to politicians when we were younger, or neoliberal institutions or foreign donors or investors, all echoing each other at different times, there was to be a new dawn soon in Nepal. A fracture of time was to come at any moment, a new age was to take over, of growth, prosperity, industry, access to education, and maybe even of a greater distribution of wealth. Everyone was working so hard for it, right?
Today as I run my own education company at 25, I still see this possibility in the robustness of our team, in the eager eyes of our students, but not so much, not today at least, in the world outside. Our company which teaches our students research skills by pairing undergraduate students with our 17 mentors abroad was recently met with a predicament which made me lose more faith in the way enterprises and research centres were being treated in Nepal.
I like to think we are a pretty smart bunch, our team, a group of Nepali graduate students and young professionals working part time and online to help our juniors back at home. So, when the British Council released a grant for ‘Research and Insights on Creative Green Economy in Nepal’, I knew this would be a great opportunity for our team to put our collective minds together and work on a proposal for a good cause. Several of our mentors were also research assistants on climate change abroad and would be willing to give a few hours of their time to stream-line our research.
The grant from the British Council was released as a part of ‘In Our Hands’ initiative, described as a youth entrepreneurship programme which aimed to build capacity, and provide “resources, platforms and connections to help develop a creative green economy in Nepal”. Wow I thought as I read the webpage: creative — green — economy, such in demand adjectives and nouns. The ‘in Our Hands’ website mentioned that their grant was part of several other initiatives which “focuses on exploring economic evidence and insights that strengthen the Creative Green Economy model” they said, “We are seeking individuals or groups to contribute to our research and insights initiative”
Wonderful, I thought, ignoring the excessive use of buzzwords, this was a great opportunity for to create research that was useful to the country. I saw the grant call on instagram, on the 25th of December, Christmas Day but was taken aback when I realized that the deadline for registration was the next day, on the 26th of December, 2023. This was my fault clearly for not having checked instagram sooner.
But when have graduate students not submitted something right before deadline? And so what? if they did not accept us and decided to provide up to a 1.7 million rupee ‘grant’ to a think tank or separate private individuals that was more suited to work on the “creative green economy”- we research students enjoy the thrill of the chase, that’s all a degree is sometimes.
I started quickly shooting down our details: name of company, registration details, website, who were on our team, prior research experiences of our members and group works. Twelve questions in and surely enough I had filled out the first page of the application. Grants are a huge deal, I learnt and one must, if ever, approach them weeks prior. However I was confused to know this particular grant had only ever been posted on the 19th of December as dated on its website and its ‘terms of reference’ and posted to instagram on 20th of December.
This meant that all research-interested individuals and institutions around Nepal had about a solid 5 days including Christmas weekend to reply to this document. After question 12, the questions on the form started getting tougher. "Please include a background for the study and a rationale for taking up this research”, “explain your methodology”, “elaborate on your budget”. Standard questions to ask researchers. But then again I thought how would researchers and other companies create a research proposal, methodology and a budget plan within 5 days of a grant call being released.
What’s more the ‘terms of reference’ for the grant mentioned that the grant award would be announced on the 28th of December and that “once the grant award is confirmed, the contract must be signed by 29 December 2023”. This seemed to be an extremely short duration for the council to go through so many proposals, methodologies, budgets and decide on a grant that would be worth over a million Nepali rupees. What if the selected researcher was outside Kathmandu? Would they be able to make it on time from Janakpur or a college in the far west? Also the timing of the grant seemed to imply that senior officials from the British Council would be on holiday between Christmas and New Year, all decisions would be made during this time.
This research business was cut-throat in Nepal, I thought. I bet I could ask a few of our mentors to quickly whip up a proposal related to the economy and environment which they might have been interested in pursuing. Maybe this would be related to the “creative green economy model”. I thought about it too. I looked it up on google: creative - green - economy- model. The Terms of Reference mentioned that the research needed to “find evidence and insights on the application and impact of the Creative Green Economy model”. My friends studying at Oxford did not seem to know what they were talking about either.
I turned to my friend, chatgpt, which stated “there isn't a widely recognized economic model specifically referred to as the "creative green economy model.” Could you imagine? What a niche research topic the team at British Council had come up with The requirements were asking for an inquiry into checking if a phenomena called ‘creative green economy model’ existed and how it was being applied, and what its impacts were when no one knows what the economic model is, if it applies to businesses or government policy.
The in our hands website in general has several more funds of a similar nature and with similarly restrictive deadlines. The “Design & Curation Grant” for example has a deadline of December 27 with results to be announced on December 28 which is an incredibly short amount of time for the council and the team at In Our Hands to go through. This separate tax-free grant also has a TOR which states “ This grant is intended to innovatively showcase and disseminate the British Council's research findings and evidence on the Creative Green Economy” What’s more, the terms of reference for both grants also proposed “for offline applications, email your submission to arts@britishcouncil.org.np" which is a rather revolutionary take on offline document submission.
In the end, we decided not to finish our application. This felt like many of the biased tender notices and grants which were causes of corruption in Nepal present everywhere from our infrastructure to teaching. This grant was designed by a team which already had a winner in mind and was indifferent to the acts of creating a fair and free economy or serving any entrepreneurs or incentivising research. The experience has made it clearer to me that the task of rooting out corruption is one that is vast and that it exists in even the most reputable of our country’s institutions. The task of saving the country’s business practices, of speaking up and calling these things out, is most definitely is in no one else’s but in our hands
( views listed in this article are personal and do not reflect that of this journal.)
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