To celebrate our coffee programme becoming Certified Wildlife Friendly™, we thought we would pass the mic to some of the other amazing projects and initiatives that have also received this certification. Without further ado, meet Khilendra Gurung from Himalayan Bio Trade, an organic, wildlife-friendly manufacturing company based in Nepal on a mission to use forest resources sustainably to help provide an income for local communities.

Himalayan Bio Trade Pvt. Ltd (HBTL) established in 2000, is a natural product manufacturing and marketing company based in Kathmandu, Nepal. About 25% of HBTL’s shareholders are community enterprises that supply the processed and semi-processed products to HBTL. HBTL’s founding mission was to use underutilized, sustainable forest resources to provide incomes and employment benefits to forest dependent community groups. Indigenous, smallholder farmers occupy Nepal’s Himalayan forest
communities in remote and rural areas, and HBTL’s goal is to link these communities produce with high value international markets. HBTL and its community enterprises consortium are also certified Organic and Wildlife Friendly™.

HBTL directly works with the rural producer groups- community forest user groups, woman groups and producer groups, cooperatives and village entrepreneurs for the feasibility to set up enterprise, technology transfer, quality management, obtaining certifications and buy back the products produced by them. Through its operations in the rural parts of Nepal, HBTL has been creating income and employment opportunities to over 15,000 people in which almost 90% of them are woman involved in the product value chain. With the income, they are able to fulfil the basic household’s requirement, send children to school, access to health care, diversify the additional income generations and also save money in cooperatives ensuring a better future.

HBTL collaborates with international buyers for community works in rural areas of Nepal-such as drinking water projects, economic diversification programs, adult literacy programs and scholarships to girls of underprivileged groups. HBTL also collaborates with community forestry user groups and national NGOs such as Wildlife

Conservation Nepal and National Trust for Nature Conservation for conservation awareness of endangered wildlife such as Red Panda and Musk Deer via the conservation awareness campaigns, inclusion of wildlife conservation in high school curriculum and wildlife monitoring in the raw material sourcing areas of Nepal Himalaya.