Founder’s Note

Set up as a non-hierarchical non- directed studio, we initially made a deliberate choice to avoid adopting any explicit mission or objectives. By early 2013, however, myriad projects had spun out of the collective entwining our members' professional lives and instigating an urge to bring some structure to the effort. A consensus emerged out of the deliberations which followed: we had a common vision but prioritized different paths to reach our goals. Thus, Karkhana was to be a network of social enterprises all committed to a shared vision “to nurture a spirit of innovating locally so as to make a global impact.” Under this broad vision, each enterprise could design its own mission.

The first two enterprises to emerge were Karkhana Proto Lab (KPL) and Karkhana.Asia, each reflecting one of the two major schools of thought within the Karkhana collective. With the conviction that innovation begins with interventions in industry, KPL worked closely with emerging Nepali industries - rural solar grids, mobile money operators, smart devices - to build and test potential solutions to the challenges they faced. Set up as a self-sustaining for-profit entity, KPL was unable to make this financial model work in the small Nepali economy. Yet, the skills the KPL team developed around product design, prototyping, and fabrication remain a core strength of Karkhana.

Begun with the conviction that innovation begins with intervention in education, Karkhana.Asia continues to support schools in adopting and integrating 21st century skills and hands-on STEAM pedagogies. In its initial years, Karkhana.Asia experimented with a range of intervention approaches - co-curricular vs extracurricular, deploying our own teachers vs in- service teacher skilling, community-based vs in-school. Finding a winning formula in 2017 with a product that mixes physical manipulatives with digital support. After rapid expansion, Karkhana.Asia serves over 70 schools and 7000 plus students. In 2018, Karkhana.Asia received a significant investment as growth capital from Business Oxygen (BO2), a venture fund set up by investors including World Bank Group and FCDO, to assist socially impactful SME’s expand their work.

In 2016, Karkhana launched a non-profit entity. This foray into the non-profit sector was driven by some collective members’ dissatisfaction that the innovations emerging from Karkhana.Asia were not reaching communities at the margins. The economics of its self-sustaining model were not and would not allow the investments necessary to engage the most disadvantaged communities. Thus, Karkhana Samuha (KS), a Nepal focused non-profit organization, was born.

Since its inception, Samuha, meaning community or collective, has successfully engaged partners in staging both on-the-ground and policy interventions. Samuha has worked with the World Wildlife Fund-Nepal to create eco-focused, open-source lesson plans introducing learners to Nepal’s unique biodiversity. Samuha has also partnered with a consortium of Save the Children as well as local governments and school associations to build the digital skills of in- service teachers. In the policy area, Samuha collaborated with UNESCO and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Nepal to design a national STEM Education Policy. Samuha’s most notable success has been it’s collaboration with the US Embassy, Nepal to create eight open-access community-based makerspaces across urban and rural Nepal. With compelling results emerging from this multi-year collaboration, Samuha and the Department of State worked to expand the project to five countries - India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives and Myanmar - across South Asia in 2020.

After a decade of work and a few grey hairs visible in the mirror, we find ourselves with a seat at the table in critical conversation about education, digital inclusion, and spreading the fruits of innovative approaches in Nepal, South Asia, and further afield. Some members of the collective are guiding national policies, others are serving as co-investigators on a global grant to investigate play as a method of learning, and yet others are contributing to designing in-service teacher training at universities. Institutionally, we are increasingly being asked by funding partners to work across national borders, often in consortia with partners across Asia and the Pacific.

It is in response to these developments and to engage emerging opportunities that we launched Karkhana Global (KG). Registered as a US-based non-profit with 501(c)3 designation, KG gives us the administrative flexibility to engage transnational opportunities while providing partners the assurance that we adhere to the highest standards of accountability. Co-locating between Seattle and Kathmandu allows us to tap into the considerable financial and intellectual resources available in higher income countries while staying true to our vision of catalyzing local innovators to make a global impact.