Kiran Pandey
Staff Writer
Four ISU teams walked away with large amounts of money when they returned from the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge held on March 15 and 16 in Boise.
Some of the winners included, Asim Dhakal, from the College of Business and Rituraj Yadav from the College of Science and Engineering, who each won $5,000 for their Narihub project under the Social or Cultural Impact category.
The Narihub project gained a wide popularity once the team returned to Pocatello.
The project is a business model invented by Dhakal and Yadav. Narihub is a developed version of e-commerce for rural Nepal. They pitched their model of e-commerce for rural Nepal in the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in 2017. Since then, they have been working to derive the Narihub project.
Nepal is a developing country and Narihub will help women in different communities get involved in gathering income and help in their socioeconomic development.
“I have seen many women who are still limited to the four walls of their kitchen,” Yadav said. “Through this project, we will train them to knit sweaters and bring them to the United States to sell.”
Yadav said that they will be filing an LLC for their business model in a week. He also said that they have been approaching the Council for Technical Education and Vocational Training (CTEVT) based in Nepal, to provide training to women.
Within a year, Rituraj and Asim have planned to train at least 50 women and start their project. If everything goes according to their plan, they will be creating a market in Pocatello, Rexburg, Boise and Moscow within two years.
Narihub will be officially registered and the project will begin when Asim and Rituraj travel to Nepal this summer.
The amount they received as a prize is enough for them to start the project and they are planning to pitch their idea in the UN Summer Youth Assembly to find potential donors to further expand Narihub.
Narihub will use their skills to make the project more impactful to the women who have been under poverty for years.
To measure the success of the project, Rituraj and Asim will set up a small team to routinely check how the women are using the profit. At the moment, Rituraj and Asim are working to increase female members in their team. They believe that adding female members to the team will help them in easily identifying women’s problems.
“Asim and Rituraj often come to my door and ask a lot of questions to develop their project,” said Dr. Jeff Street. “It is very good to hear their success and I am happy as they are moving ahead to flourish their project to make an impact to unrepresented women under poverty.”
Britt Dickman, a graduate student in the College of Education, won the top prize of $12,000 for her ReBox project under in the Health and Healthy Living category.
Luke Gilbert, a student in the College of Business, also won $5,000 under the Social or Cultural Impact category. In addition, the Narihub team and the Guardian Lights team also won $1,000 each for the best marketing of their product.
“There were 24 teams in the final among more than 90 applicants,” Street said. “Our students did an amazing job this year preparing for the rigors of the competition.”
