Manoj Paudel: Chevening Scholarship is not the Prize. It is the Starting Line.

Most people apply for Chevening because of what it offers. Manoj Paudel applied because of what it is.

"Chevening is not really a scholarship," he says. "It is a fellowship. The UK’s FCDO invests in people they expect will go on to do consequential work in their home countries, and that framing, that you are being chosen for who you might become, not just where you might study, is what made it the one to apply for."

That distinction, between what Chevening provides and what Chevening is, shaped everything that followed. He knew before he arrived at LSE that the year was not about the degree. It was about the cohort, the access, and the quality of thinking you absorb when you are placed in proximity to people operating at the frontier of their fields.

"The classroom you can buy. The cohort and the conviction that comes with it, you can't."

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Manoj was a 2016/17 Chevening Scholar, studying the MSc in Local Economic Development at LSE. He was just above the minimum experience threshold, a year or two beyond the two years Chevening requires, but he believes what made his application stand out was not seniority. It was clarity.

Nepal had just promulgated its 2015 Constitution. The implementation questions around federalism, subnational economic governance, and local development financing were live, urgent, and largely unanswered. He tied his own trajectory to those questions concretely, not as a general interest in development, but as a specific engagement with specific problems happening on the ground in his country at that precise moment.

His advice for future applicants is precise and direct:

"Do the homework on the UK government's own development priorities, and find the genuine overlap with Nepal's priorities, not a manufactured one. The strongest applications sit at that intersection because that is what the FCDO is actually trying to fund. And write about real things you've done and real things you want to do, not abstractions. Selectors read thousands of applications. Specificity is what they remember."

In his interview, he was asked about Nepal's new Constitution and what it meant for economic governance.

"That felt like exactly the right kind of question," he says, "because it tested whether you had actually thought about your country's situation, or whether you were performing a thought-out version of it."

He prepared not by rehearsing answers but by rehearsing the underlying reasoning. He read widely on the UK's foreign and development policy positions, mapped them honestly against Nepal's own priorities, and built the capacity to think out loud about hard questions under mild pressure.

"The interview is less about correctness and more about whether you can think out loud under mild pressure. Treat it as a conversation, not an exam."

His advice for anyone shortlisted, four words that cut through everything else in the series:

"Have a view. Defend it."

Ask Manoj what was most valuable about his Chevening year and he doesn't mention a course, a professor, or a classmate. He mentions the public lectures.

LSE has one of the richest public lecture traditions anywhere in the world. Nobel laureates. Distinguished practitioners. Central bank governors. Philosophers. Leaders from across the political spectrum. Almost every weekday evening. He went to as many as he could, sometimes more than the coursework strictly demanded.

"What that year taught me is that proximity to the frontier of thinking, being in the same room as the people shaping the next idea, is itself a form of education. You absorb how serious people argue, hedge, and change their minds. That is not something you can replicate from a reading list."

He also shared a flat that year with Dr. Nitin Nishchal Bhandari, another Nepali Chevening Scholar at LSE. What started as a friendship has become one of the most enduring things to come out of the year, professionally and personally. "Chevening relationships," he says simply, "don't expire when the visa does."

On the lighter side, he contributed the recipe for "Momo Must-tang" to the Chevening Meals series, and it was selected among the top three. A small thing, he says. But a useful reminder that the Chevening experience is as much about sharing your country with the cohort as it is about absorbing the UK.

He noticed, too, that the Chevening programme's UK city visit slots filled instantly. A small but useful lesson embedded in the experience itself: opportunities in Chevening reward the people who pay attention and move first.

The MSc in Local Economic Development at LSE was, at its core, about how to design institutions that mobilise capital for productive use in places where markets are thin and institutions are still forming.

That is exactly the problem he returned to Nepal to address.

He founded Aadhyanta Fund Management Limited, AFML, Nepal's first SEBON-licensed private equity and venture capital fund manager, which today manages the Nepal Opportunity Fund series. He chaired the Investment and International Affairs Committee at FNCCI, Nepal's apex private sector body.

Through the Aadhyanta Accelerator Programme, he has worked across all levels of government and with multiple development partners, including FAO and Switzerland's SDC, to channel long-term, patient capital into Nepali enterprises in agriculture, energy, and beyond. That work has since generated a spin-off: Aadyanta Advisory, which he co-founded to focus specifically on ecosystem development work.

Before all of this, there was Innovate Next Impact, the first company he started, and the space where he has continued to test lessons and innovations from his Chevening and LSE experience. That work runs in parallel with the capital-focused work at Aadhyanta, grounding the institutional theory in practice at the company level.

What Chevening opened, he says, was not a single door. It was a quality of access. The credibility of the scholarship, and the LSE training behind it, meant that when he returned, he could move credibly across very different rooms: policy rooms in Singha Durbar, investor rooms in Singapore and Doha, university rooms in Cambridge and London.

"That fluency is the most underrated thing the year gives you."

The throughline from LSE to AFML to FNCCI is a single idea he first encountered during his Chevening year and has never let go of: institutions, well-designed, are how countries actually develop.

———

He has one regret from his Chevening year, and it isn't about a module or a missed opportunity.

He should have written more. Not coursework, public writing. Essays, articles, opinion pieces for outlets that would have published them while he was still in London, still surrounded by the world-class thinkers whose ideas he was absorbing. The UK year is a rare window: time, access, proximity to global publications. He underused it. It has taken him longer than it should have to build that writing habit since.

He'd also have travelled more, within the UK and across Europe. The Chevening cohort scatters back across forty-plus countries after the year ends. The in-person time you have during the programme compounds for decades. He didn't waste it. But he wishes he had spent more of it on the move.

His final thought is one that belongs to every scholar in this series, but he says it with more precision than most:

"The people who get the most out of Chevening are the ones who treat it not as the prize, but as the starting line."

He is still, by his own account, in the early innings of making the FCDO's bet on him pay off. The conviction that drives him has not changed since he boarded the flight to London in 2016.

"I owe Nepal more, not less, because of that year. That is the thing I carry with me most."

Applications for the 2026–27 Chevening Scholarship open in August 2026.

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Manoj Paudel is a Chevening Scholar (2016–17), Founder & Executive Chairperson of Aadhyanta Fund Management Limited, co-founder of Aadyanta Advisory, and founder of Innovate Next Impact. He is a former Chair of the Investment and International Affairs Committee at FNCCI. He studied MSc Local Economic Development at the London School of Economics & Political Science. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Story #011, ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

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