Ram Tiwari works at the intersection of justice, education, and inclusion, drawing on a background in peacebuilding and dialogue to connect fields that are usually treated as separate. He helps educators, institutions, and policymakers build learning environments and justice systems rooted in dignity, participation, and repair.
Read My Work Invite to SpeakEducation that includes every child is not idealism. It is the most practical thing a school can do.
Nepal’s classrooms tell a story most education systems prefer not to hear. Children with disabilities, learning differences, and marginalized backgrounds are still told, in various ways, that school was not built for them. Ram Tiwari’s work in inclusive education starts from a single conviction: the problem is never the child. The problem is the design.
As the founder of Inclusive Education Nepal (IEN) and a Harvard-certified UDL Practitioner, Ram works at the intersection of policy, pedagogy, and practice. His approach draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework that anticipates the diversity of learners from the start, rather than retrofitting support after children have already fallen behind. His book “Inclusive Education: Myths and Realities” (2025), the first of its kind in Nepali, directly challenges the assumptions that keep children out: that segregation is protective, that disability is a personal misfortune, and that mainstream schooling is something to be earned.
This work does not stop at the classroom door. Ram engages governments, teacher-training institutions, and civil society organizations to shift policy frameworks from charity-based models of disability to rights-based models of participation.
Punishment tells people what they cannot do. Restorative justice asks what needs to be repaired.
When Nepal’s courts and communities were left to handle the aftermath of a decade-long armed conflict, the question of justice took on an urgency that conventional legal frameworks were not built for. Ram Tiwari entered this space as a lawyer, a certified mediator, and a scholar with a specific conviction: that healing and accountability are not opposites, and that communities have a right to participate in the processes that affect them most.
As the founder and Executive Director of the Nepal Forum for Restorative Justice (NFRJ), Ram designed and led Nepal’s first restorative justice programs in partnership with the judiciary. In a legal system built almost entirely around adversarial processes, this was a landmark departure. He has trained lawyers, judges, police officers, and social justice workers across the country. His published works include several books on restorative justice in the Nepali context, a national training manual for justice sector workers, and a co-authored chapter in a Springer volume on comparative restorative justice across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
Internationally, his contributions carry equal weight. He was nominated to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Restorative Justice Working Group, and served on the Expert Committee of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the revision of the UN Handbook on Restorative Justice. He has delivered trainings for UNDP Somalia and presented at restorative justice conferences across Asia, South Asia, and the United States.
Safety in schools is not a policy checkbox. It is the precondition for everything else.
A child who is afraid cannot learn. A child who has been harmed and received no response cannot trust. Ram Tiwari’s approach to safeguarding begins with these two truths and builds outward from them, to the structures, relationships, and institutional cultures that either protect children or fail to.
His work connects safeguarding directly to inclusion. The children most vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and neglect are often the same children excluded from the center of school life: children with disabilities, those from marginalized castes or communities, and those living in post-conflict environments. Safeguarding, in this framework, is not a separate department or an annual training. It is woven into how classrooms are designed, how teachers are trained, and how schools relate to the families and communities around them.
Through Inclusive Education Nepal, Ram has worked with schools across Nepal to develop safeguarding systems grounded in child rights, restorative approaches, and UDL principles. His training work on punishment-free classroom management directly addresses one of the most persistent safeguarding failures in South Asian schools: the normalization of physical punishment and public humiliation as tools of discipline, both of which research consistently links to dropout, disengagement, and long-term harm.
Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of relationships strong enough to survive it.
Nepal’s transition from a decade-long armed conflict toward a functioning democracy has depended on thousands of small conversations that rarely make headlines: between communities and former combatants, between families divided by violence, between institutions that distrust each other and citizens who have stopped trusting institutions entirely. Ram Tiwari has spent a significant part of his career building the conditions for those conversations.
As National Coordinator of the Nepal Dialogues Initiative, as a circle facilitator for community peace committees, and as a researcher who has mapped Nepal’s dialogue and peacebuilding landscape for GIZ and other international partners, Ram brings both methodological depth and ground-level understanding to this work. His MA in Conflict, Peace and Development Studies gives him a theoretical foundation. His years in the field give him something theory cannot: knowledge of what actually works when people who have harmed each other are asked to sit in the same room.
His book “Dialogues and Restorative Justice in Nepal” (2023) draws on this experience directly. It documents how restorative circles, when properly facilitated, can move communities from punishment-seeking to meaning-making, and from isolation to collective accountability. He has taken this work internationally, presenting at human rights forums in Bangladesh, a restorative justice conference in Singapore, and peacebuilding forums in the United States.
Justice is often associated with courts, laws, and punishment. Yet long before individuals encounter the legal system, they experience institutions that shape their sense of dignity and belonging. For many children, school is where they first encounter fairness, authority, and participation. When classrooms are inclusive, children experience respect and belonging. When classrooms exclude, label, or marginalize, children experience the early formation of inequality. Building inclusive education systems is therefore not only an educational task. It is a societal responsibility. Transforming classrooms helps build societies that are more compassionate, inclusive, and just.
Even though Amnesty International had defined it as a flawed step forward, after years of endless political shenanigans that exasperated the thousands of citizens who had been seeking justice, it finally seemed that the peace process could reach its final phase.
In the aftermath of tragic human losses and the subsequent personal suffering affecting hundreds of families whose daughters, sons, husbands, and wives lost their lives, Nepal must reckon with the need for a process of national reconciliation, or at least for facing the past and dealing with it.
There are many ways to measure the levels of social and economic inequities in a diverse country like Nepal. The National Census, together with other livelihood-related measurements certainly offers a holistic portrayal that captures some of the inequalities among the different ethnic and social groups living in a nation.
Ram Tiwari speaks to educators, policymakers, and organizations about transforming education systems and building inclusive learning environments.
His talks focus on the connections between education, justice, safeguarding, and social change.
If you are interested in collaborating on research, inviting Ram to speak,
or supporting initiatives that promote inclusive education and safeguarding,
get in touch.