Binita Karki

Binita Karki is an engineer and Youth Program Officer at the United Nations Development Program who overcame extreme poverty in her remote village of Kolbi, Bara, Nepal. Raised by a single mother after her father left because she was born a daughter, she walked to her government school and worked manual labor jobs as a teenager to pay for her exam fees. Despite these hardships, she excelled academically, passing her school leaving exams in the first division and earning scholarships to study English at Makwanpur Multiple Campus, where she topped her faculty in her first year. During her studies, she worked as a newspaper market representative, taught English, published a book of ghazals, and won the 2013 National Top Seven Debater competition. At eighteen years old, she mobilized her earnings and support from friends to build a brick and mud house to ensure her mother had a safe place to live.

Today, Karki leverages her lived experiences to empower marginalized youth and advocate for girls education. Her journey of resilience has taken her to over a dozen countries, including representing Plan International as a keynote speaker in France, where she was featured on France 24 and Brut International. In addition to her international advocacy, she has established an informal community fund with friends to provide stationery and medicine to needy children in her home village. Looking to the future, she aims to transition into local politics to serve as a visionary leader and policymaker, with the ultimate goal of developing her home municipality of Kolbi into a model community.