Mr. Bhasker Kafle is a peacebuilding practitioner with two decades of experience in conflict prevention, dialogue and social cohesion, fourteen of them with the United Nations Development Programme. He currently leads UNDP’s regional conflict prevention and peacebuilding work across Asia and the Pacific from the Bangkok Regional Hub, where he directs a European Union-funded programme building community resilience to violent extremism in digital space across eight Asian countries.
His work began in Nepal’s post-conflict transition. As Dialogue Coordinator and later Regional Dialogue Advisor with UNDP’s Conflict Prevention Programme, he established district-level dialogue forums bringing together political party representatives, government officials and civil society leaders who had been on opposing sides of the armed conflict, and later managed UNDP’s Social Cohesion and Democratic Participation project across four provinces during the rollout of federalism. He has also served with UNDP in South Sudan, where he led a national Innovation Challenge for Peace, and with International Alert, where he researched and wrote on access to security and justice at the district level in Nepal.
He holds an MPhil in Education with a specialisation in Development Studies from Kathmandu University and a Master of Arts in Sociology and Anthropology from Tribhuvan University. He founded Multidisciplinary Academic PerspectiveS (MAPS) Nepal, which convened the weekly public discussion series Shastrartha at Martin Chautari, and initiated the Peace Group within the Association of International NGOs in Nepal.
He has served as an adviser to FNB Nepal since 2015, when the organisation responded to the Gorkha earthquake and scaled its Community Mobile Legal Clinic to reach affected communities. He advises the leadership on organisational strategy, on the design of FNB’s mediation training curriculum, and on international partnerships.