Background
Nepali society needs visionary and creative thinkers to understand the changing social, political, cultural and economic climate. Research on these areas is essential and must be supported by quality research that young researchers conduct. Achieving high-quality research in Nepal is especially challenging given the research environment of the country. Terrain related to science, development, climate, and policy is still fragmented. The research trend does not promote critical thinking and the investments in research are limited as well. Findings are usually poorly documented and not shared among researchers even if they exist. The outputs are rarely communicated to the wider public in a language that they can understand.
Young graduates can play a significant role in carrying out research, sharing results among their peers and other groups within society for betterment. Graduates from Nepali universities need to engage with each other and a wider society in order to promote economic development, social welfare and environmental stewardship. However, they lack skills to carryout quality research and get little input from research organizations that pioneer in these issues. Due to this challenge, the findings do not generate new knowledge that will be instrumental to address policy issues and challenges. This will lead to low quality input of produced graduates to the think tanks. In both cases, society loses.
Improving the quality of education is not only the responsibility of educational institutions, but the role played by other stakeholders is equally important. It requires a partnership among these stakeholders to improve the quality of research in the country. For this reason, Central Department of Environment Science – TU, Resources Himalaya Foundation, and ISET-Nepal formed a consortium in 2015 to help build an ecosystem capable of carrying out high-quality research. For this, the consortium agreed to annually hold Graduate Conference of the universities in Nepal known as Himalayan Knowledge Conclave (HKC). The conference is held on first week of April every year.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Government of Nepal (GoN-MoEST) has generously patronized and supported the initiatives since 2018.
Now, it is a time to work together for 2020 conference. With this motive, the Graduate Conference 2020 has been proposed to convene from April 5 to 7, 2020. The Agriculture and Forestry University has shown its keen interest to host the Conference at its premises in Rampur, Chitwan.
Conference goal
To build an interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing platform for young researchers, with a particular focus on environment, resource conservation, management, economic and social development and innovations and technologies.
HKC – 2020
Call for abstracts for oral and poster presentations (Abstract submission deadline: February 25, 2020)
For further details: https://knowledgeconclave.com.np