Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Making community action easier
Baibhav Shrestha is building eSahara, a platform where fundraising campaigns are verified before launch and tracked through to outcome. He has spent the past year building its first prototype and putting it in front of more than 200 people, from NGO workers and volunteers to community leaders.
For Baibhav Shrestha the idea for eSahara did not begin with a business plan. It began with sitting in NGO meetings and watching people spend hours doing work that should not have taken hours.
Fundraising updates were scattered across social media. Volunteer coordination happened in messaging apps. Spreadsheets needed updating by hand. Information was copied, forwarded and re-updated in different places, which made things hard to coordinate, hard to verify and nearly impossible to track from start to finish.
“I realized the biggest challenge wasn't a lack of generosity but a lack of trust and coordination.”
Baibhav Shrestha
After seeing it happen again and again, he started thinking there had to be a way to solve those problems together. That became eSahara: one workflow in which campaigns are verified before they launch, progress is tracked and updated in real time, and donors, volunteers and organisations can see how their support turns into outcomes.
The shape of it came from working with NGOs on fundraising, volunteering and community programmes. "I kept seeing organizations spend more time managing tools than serving the people they were trying to help," he says. There was another side to it too: people who wanted to help often had no reliable way to know whether an online fundraiser was legitimate, or whether their money reached the people it was meant for.
Over the past year he built the first prototype and then took it to the people it was for, presenting to more than 200 NGO workers, volunteers, social service workers and community leaders, asking questions and changing the product on what he heard. "Every conversation has shaped the product," he says.
The conversations taught him that the problem was not putting existing NGO processes on a new website. It meant building verification, transparency and coordination into the system itself.
eSahara was recognised as one of the Top 60 Global Innovations at the UN STI Forum 2026 and featured in the UNDESA STI Solution Book. "That recognition made me even more determined," he says, "because it made me realize that the platform I am building has the potential to help communities far beyond my own."
It is still being built. Baibhav is still a student, and the platform is moving from prototype to full development ahead of a launch in the coming months. He does not pretend to know where it goes. "I'm still figuring out where all of this will take me, but I know I'd rather spend my youth trying, building, failing and learning rather than looking back one day and wondering what I could have done."
The goal he names is "to build a platform that becomes the trusted infrastructure for social impact across Asia."