On a baking hot summer day in Butwal, a town in Nepal’s southern plains, 29-year-old Govinda Shrestha is perspiring all over as he drives screws into an aluminum door inside a tin-roofed workshop.

Another worker is cutting a glass panel to fit into a window frame. Two others are sawing aluminum pipes to make a curtain wall.

The workshop, very noisy and busy this week as they are finishing up a job for a new office, opened just nine months ago but is already turning a profit. “I could not have asked for more.

I am not only earning a living for myself but for four other men as well,” said Govinda, who owns the workshop.

Govinda set up his businesses after attending a three-month training program on aluminum fabrication run by the Deurali Janata Technical School, a private training centre, under the ADB-financed $20 million Skills Development Project.

During the training, he learned to make aluminum doors, windows, and partition rooms.