Gerry writing. UMN is seeking to answer the question: can AI help alleviate poverty in the remote rural areas of Nepal? Why is this needed? From July 7-10, 2026, a Nepali colleague, Arun Belbase and I attended the UN sponsored...

Lora writing. Our return to Nepal (about 7 weeks ago now), as I have told some of you, was marked for me by the surprise grief at my mother's death. Grief is sneaky that way; I am reminded in...

Mitch's reflection: As of early afternoon on Thursday, September 10th, fifteen days after the horrific Nepal flooding of August 26, 2026, the numbers are staggering. From just this tiny, narrow river corridor, comprising the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers, where...

Lora writing. Each fall that we have been here has brought national grief: widespread flooding in 2024, the political uprising in 2025, and now, yesterday, there was devastation in Nepal, perhaps unlike anything that has ever been seen. The...

Lora writing. One of our major tasks of the summer was sharing about the work of UMN. Mitch and I both love our work and think the work of the organisation as a whole is pretty amazing too. So,...

In my last post, I announced the start of the PCC funded "AI for Good Pilot Project" at the UMN office in Kathmandu (Thapathali). We have changed the name of the project to: "AI for Poverty Reduction in Rural...

Lora writing. I had this blog partially written when on Thursday night (Kathmandu time, only 48 hours ago) before I had a chance to finish and share it, I received a phone call that my mother, Gloria, had died....

Mitch writing. Elections were held in Nepal and everything went smoothly. Election day itself and the following days of vote counting were quite uneventful. The party that won biggest, in an unprecedented (for Nepal's short history of democracy) landslide,...

"Can AI help to alleviate poverty in the remote rural areas of Nepal where UMN works? Can it be used as a tool for good? A pilot project at UMN aims to begin to answer those questions. With the...

God is in the small things, the gentle things, the subtle things. I am reminded of this as I see our Funding Team leader, Bibhu Singh hold the hand of a woman who has had a hard life. She...