"He really wanted to learn, he had that energy," recalls founder of Alternatives, Jiban Baral. Jiban established Alternatives three years ago, as a youth enterprise that would help other young people utilise their own creativity and be able to start small businesses. Jiban and his friends started off from the school level, going around schools in Pokhara, where they are based, and teaching group entrepreneurship skills. A group of kids thought up the idea to publish wall magazines at a small school in Pokhara to help save paper, after Alternatives worked with the kids there.

But Jiban is more focused on helping villages like Taprang, where Alternatives has been working ever since Jiban was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship. He started encouraging small enterprise in the village, so young people wouldn't be compelled to leave for the cities. From repairing old unused computers from offices in the cities to use in Taprang, to helping locals start catering services so the villagers wouldn't have to spend to bring caterers from the cities, Alternatives has helped foster lots of ideas that were already there. 'The first time we came,' says Jiban, 'they couldn't conceptualise what we wanted to do.' But they got locals to be involved and even 75-year-old women are now learning how to use computers for the first time.

But things are hardly smooth at Alternatives. They hardly have aid, because people are not willing to trust them, as all the members are young. There have been hardly any donors who've funded their programs, and they have to raise funds from commitment fees most of the time. Moreover, the centre is still not fully running, as all of the members are part-time or volunteers. Jiban himself also works as a network manager at the western union money transfer. Yet, their scope and objectives remain large.

"Young people are hardly reminded of their value," says Jiban, who was the first Nepali to be invited for the Clinton Global Initiative program in the US to present a paper about youth entrepreneurship this year. Jiban believes that youth are a great resource in Nepal, where 28 per cent of our population falls under that category. "However, our education system hardly gives us practical skills, and people who're educated have to seek for jobs, rather than having the power to create them,' says Jiban.

But the number of innovations that the team has been able to bring out is inspiring. A boy they trained added value to milk by selling milk in mineral water bottles, with proper training to youth who'd been guiding at caves, their work was turned into a profession, and a young woman noticed that there weren't any cosmetic shops in her street and started one. Most of their ideas are small, but ingenuous. "You don't have to do different things to succeed," says a smiling Jiban, "you have to do things differently."

* Roma Aryal in Pokhara