Ashutosh Tiwari

Ashutosh Tiwari is the Managing Director at SAFAL Partners, Nepal’s first business operations-focused investment firm, which works with small and medium manufacturing companies.

From 2014 to 2017, Ashutosh was the CEO at Sherpa Adventure Gear-Nepal, where he improved the factory-related operations, supply chain and logistics, internal business processes, and global compliance capabilities of this export-oriented high-end outdoor gear company.

From 2010 to 2014, he was the Country Director at WaterAid Nepal, during which he was an elected Chairman of AIN, the Association of 114 International NGOs in Nepal. From 2007 to 2009, he was the CEO at Himalmedia, an influential media house, where he negotiated with militant labor unions and
turned the company around financially and operationally.

In 2008, he co-founded Entrepreneurs for Nepal (E4N), an institution that helped kick-start Nepal’s organized entrepreneurial ecosystem. E4N has an active online and offline presence with 85,000 members. Early in his career, he worked for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and German Technical Co-operation (GiZ). Ashutosh started his career as an anti-bonded labor activist, serving as a full-time strategist to the successful grassroots movement that freed almost 200,000 ethnic Tharu agricultural bonded laborers (kamaiya) from the age-old practice of debt-bondage in rural Nepal.

In 2011, the World Economic Forum in Geneva honored Ashutosh, a Harvard graduate, as a Young Global Leader. Ashutosh is well-known in Nepal as a much sought-after teacher and mentor to entrepreneurs and students.

"Education is the force multiplier of innate human goodness and capabilities. A great education allows the mind to make the best use of all the available resources one has access -- to improve not only one’s own life in myriad ways, but also of many, many others."