Executive board

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Bijaya Devkota is the Founder and Chairman of the Gorkha Foundation. He provides the vision for developing the various programs and long-term strategies for the foundation.

He is the Chief Information Officer at Charles County Public Schools in Maryland, USA, delivering leadership in the development and implementation of their educational solutions. Previously he worked at Coopers & Lybrand, Price Waterhouse Coopers and IBM where he was responsible for supplying information technology, strategy, architecture and customer relationship management expertise to clients. He has a Masters degree from American University in Washington, D.C., USA.


Kalakheti Sir

Buddhi R. Kalakheti is the co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Gorkha Foundation. He has extensive involvement managing development programs, overseeing operational implementation and developing strategic partnerships. He is also a Senior Manager at Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Prior to this, he served several leadership roles as Manager at Airgas and Toyota, and as IT Project Manager at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals. He has more twelve years experience in IT industry management and three years in rural development, showing considerable expertise in team building, planning and conflict resolution.

Buddhi has held the position of Vice-President for Friends of Nepal, New Jersey, and is a current board member of Nirvana Foundation. He holds a Masters degree from Bellevue University, Nebraska, USA.


Ganesh Shrestha was born and raised in Gorkha district, and is currently District Coordinator for the Gorkha Foundation

He has more than 35 years of experience in Construction Management, Agriculture, and Community Development, and was previously Site Engineer for the United Mission in Nepal. He has a vocational degree from the Butwal Technical Institute in Nepal.


Harvey Blustain first became involved with Nepal in the 1970s, when as a doctoral student in cultural anthropology he conducted field research in a village in Gorkha district. After a career in academia and management consulting, Harvey and his wife Malinda returned to that same village in 2012. For two years they were volunteer teachers in the government school, teaching English and computer studies to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. He is Chair of the Eugene-Kathmandu Sister City Association.


Chris Maxted hails from Dorset, UK, and received a BA in Fine Art from London Guildhall University in 2002 before co-founding Earwig Books, a creative publishers involved in developing participatory educational projects. After seven years in London, in 2006 he qualified and began working as a teacher until leaving the UK for Asia in late 2009.

He first travelled to Gorkha region in 2010, where he spent a total of 4 months working in collaboration with the Gorkha Foundation towards making sustainable improvements to the quality of rural education in this part of Nepal.

In 2011, in partnership with Gorkha Foundation, Chris initiated the Rural Education Network project – aimed at providing training for teachers in using pupil-centred techniques in the classroom. This was followed by several visits over the following years to pilot training programs in the district, which have since fed into Gorkha Foundation’s educational remit.

Chris currently teaches in Hong Kong, and continues to work in close partnership with Gorkha Foundation to develop their educational strategies.


Malinda Blustain

Malinda Blustain is the retired Director of the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Massachusetts. An archaeologist herself, she conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Honduras, and the United States. In 2012, she moved to a village in Palungtar, Gorkha district with her husband Harvey, who had conducted anthropological fieldwork in that village in the 1970s. For two years, they were volunteer teachers in the government school, teaching English and computer studies to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. She is currently Secretary of the Eugene-Kathmandu Sister City Association.