BANJARA, GB

Swisscontact, 14 years of private sector development experience covering the wider aspects of enterprise promotion.

GB Banjara has 14 years of private sector development experience covering the wider aspects of enterprise promotion: i.e. entrepreneurship, BDS market development, enterprise education, sub sector and value chain promotion. He worked for 7 years with Swisscontact’s BDS market development project in Nepal prior to joining GTZ in 2004. With GTZ, he coordinated a private sector promotion project in Nepal to upgrade several value chains i.e. orthodox tea, handmade paper, honey, bamboo, herbs, carpet and mandarin orange along with a pilot Local Economic Development (LED) project.

Since July 2009, he is working with Aga Khan Foundation in Afghanistan as National Enterprise Development Program Manager. In his current function, he is responsible for a multi donor enterprise development program being implemented in four northern provinces of Afghanistan.

He has been a lead resource person in many national andinternational level Value Chain training courses in Nepal, Bangladesh, India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the Philippines. He has been involved in designing several VC promotion projects and developing capacity of the project staff members and stakeholders in these countries. During his employment with GTZ, he also served as a joint coordinator of GTZ’s Asia wide VC working group, which is a forum consisting of experts from more than 15 VC promotion projects from 10 Asian countries in which GTZ is implementing projects.

He has offered consulting services to several organizations such as GTZ, DfID, SKAT, Swisscontact, ICIMOD, UNDP, SNV, Aga Khan Foundation and government of Nepal. His areas of interest in consulting encompass broader aspects of business management and SME promotion including VC promotion, BDS market development, entrepreneurship training, strengthening business associations, quality management, production and operations management, marketing research and business plans.

Between 2002 to 2008, he taught operations management and entrepreneurship courses and conducted seminars on Business Plan as adjunct faculty for Executive MBA and MBA level students at Ace Institute of Management in Kathmandu, a leading management college in Nepal.

Before joining the development sector, he worked with private sector of Nepal for over 4 years. Major achievements in the private sector include setting up of a 100000 liter per day capacity dairy plant and an electric vehicle company in Nepal.

He served as vice president of Network for Quality Productivity and competitiveness, Nepal. He is an honorary member of Nepal Handmade paper Association.

He holds a MBA and a degree in Chemical Engineering.

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