Bloom School Receives Sustainability Award

Bloom Nepal School, an investee company, of One to Watch is revolutionizing the education sector in Nepal. As the pioneer of interest-based learning in Nepal, Bloom Nepal was awarded the Zayed Sustainability Award on January 15, 2020. An award of $100,000 was handed over in UAE for its initiative to drive energy self-sufficiency in its school. This project entails the setting up of biogas units to transform nearly a ton of organic waste into biogas and organic manure. Bloom Nepal was among one of six recipients of this prestigious award falling in the category of global high schools focusing on sustainable energy projects.

The award will prove to be a game-changer in the school’s biogas energy program. In the long run, the school intends to proceed with its energy program through partnerships with local government bodies.

Here, the school students will play a pivotal part as the leading stakeholders. The focus will be on the three R’s of Sustainability: reduce municipal waste, reuse organic waste by converting the waste into biogas and recycle garbage. The school aims to utilize the generated biogas for cooking in the school’s canteen and use the manure for farming.

With a strong belzief in Benjamin Franklin’s, ‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest’ the founder of this school, Ram Krishna Rijal established this school to build capacities of rural children to make them globally competitive. Rijal who hails from a rural community, had the opportunity to graduate from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 2012. Prior to making his entrepreneurial debut, he worked with the World Bank and Thomas Herzfeld Asset Management and IFMR India.

Rijal found support in Chandan Mishra, a New York University (Abu Dhabi Campus) engineering undergraduate. Chandan was instrumental in designing the school using lightweight earthquake resistant materials. This comes in the wake of the disastrous earthquake of 2015 which grazed its first school building to the ground.

One to Watch’s post-earthquake intervention helped the school to expand its footprint through acquisition of another school in Itahari. The school started with 18 students in 2013 and by 2019, it had enrolled up to 450 students. Bloom Nepal’s goal is to build the largest network of schools in Nepal focusing on interest-based learning.