Charity boss opens luxury boutique hotel in Nepal

SINGAPORE – Charity boss Robert Kee, 77, is opening a luxury boutique hotel in Nepal.

Himalayan Hideaway Resort Pokhara, The Centara Collection is a 42-room resort with lush views of the Annapurna mountains, complete with skylights, private fire pits, personal gardens, yoga classes and spa services.

Perched on the hills of the Kaskikot area, about 30 minutes’ drive from the Nepali city of Pokhara, the hotel is accepting guests from December. Opening promotion rates start at around $160 a night and room sizes start at 44 sq m.

Targeting global luxury travellers represents a new direction for Mr Kee, founder of Operation Hope Foundation (OHF), where he works full-time as its executive chairman. The former electronic engineer and entrepreneur does not claim any salary or expenses from OHF.

Registered as a charity in Singapore in 2001, OHF operates in Cambodia and works with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Nepal to run children’s homes, housing, sanitation and livelihood programmes, and other charitable projects in both countries.

Charity remains top of mind for Mr Kee, who aims to structure Himalayan Hideaway Resort Pokhara like a social enterprise while gunning to bring more tourists to Nepal.

“Part of the profit from the hotel can fund my charity work,” says the grandfather of four. “If you can create jobs, that’s the ultimate form of charity.”

When the resort is at full strength, it will employ 80 full-time staff. Its deep water well supplies clean water to a nearby village, while its six-year construction provided employment for locals.

Mr Kee and his wife Susan Ho, 75, own the business, which is run by Thai hotel operator Centara Hotels & Resorts. He declined to reveal the cost of setting up the resort.

The story of the resort goes back 17 years. At the end of 2008, the couple, who have three adult children, bought 400,000 sq ft of unused rice fields, where the hotel now stands, from more than 20 individual landowners for $400,000, just $1 per square foot at the time, he says.

It was a deliberate decision to cut out intermediaries. “I wanted to pay the villagers directly, (otherwise) they wouldn’t get their fair share. They were so happy.”

Engineering background was useful

The path to hotel ownership did not run smooth, however. The resort was the brainchild of an architect friend of Mr Kee’s, who died before his plans came to fruition.

Mr Kee felt he had to take over.

“I had to become an architect. I could do it because I’m used to working in a developing country. I’m able to start a hotel because I’m familiar (with how things work),” he says. “I’m almost Nepali. I’ve been there every year for 25 years. I’m in love with the country.”

He describes Nepal as being “not very business-friendly”. In 2022, for instance, Nepal restricted imports of non-essential items – including cars, cosmetics and gold – after a fall in its foreign currency reserves.

Still, he finds deep satisfaction in his work there. After a massive 2015 earthquake in Nepal left thousands homeless in remote mountainous areas, he led his OHF team in coming up with the idea of quake-resistant, sustainable “rice bag” houses.

Carrying empty rice bags, villagers go up to high-altitude terrain where roads may be damaged and fill them with soil at construction sites. OHF has built 155 rice bag homes, which are reinforced with barbed wire and steel rebars, in different parts of Nepal.

Mr Kee says the rigour of his engineering background comes in handy because he has to micromanage myriad aspects of OHF projects.

When looking at a topographical plan for the new hotel, for example, he noticed the designs showed water “flowing up” in the drainage system, which meant one drain was unnecessary.

Preventing corruption

Having skin in the game is vital, he says.

Because he was directly involved in designing the “rice bag” houses, he knew that the material cost of each house was $1,200. A contractor in Nepal later approached him to take over their construction, to the tune of more than $5,200 a house.

“I built it, I understand the costs, I know the materials,” he says. “My forte in charity work is detecting fraud... You must make sure your money goes to where it is meant to be.”

Since 1995, he has been involved in various poverty alleviation projects in Cambodia, the Philippines and Nepal, with church groups and individually, but he wanted to be more than a “Santa Claus” philanthropist, he says.

In 2002, he learnt a sharp lesson when he asked a villager in Cambodia why his rice donations were being rejected. Mr Kee learnt that the vendor had cheated him, providing rice with broken grains, which stank of mould.

Mr Kee became laser-focused on tackling corruption in a sector where NGOs in developing countries have been accused of fraud, inefficiency and over-inflation of their claims of help.

In Hope Village Prey Veng, OHF’s children’s home in Cambodia’s Prey Veng province, which cares for some 120 abandoned children, he instituted a system where it is not only the cook who buys groceries for the home. No one person is in a position to declare 20kg of chicken has been bought for the residents, when the meat weighed only 10kg, he explains.

A rotation of staff takes turns to go to the market; meals are listed in menus with ingredients and costs; expenses are scrutinised; and the produce is weighed – the Singapore office, which comprises four staff, inspects the weigh-in process weekly by Zoom video call.

Mr Kee keeps the cost-benefit ratio of OHF donations to 20/80 – 20 per cent is allocated for costs and 80 per cent for beneficiaries. He estimates 83 per cent of donations for OHF go directly to those it helps. He himself is among OHF’s donors, contributing 20 per cent of its total donations of around $906,000 in 2024.

The power of magic

The former Colombo Plan scholar, who studied at the University of Auckland, is the youngest of six children of a stenographer and a housewife.

By his late 20s, he became the managing director of a British electronics firm and he has since built up three companies in the electronics and data communications field, two of which have been sold.

Mr Kee is a non-executive chairman at Applied Digital System, an electronics company started by his wife in 1978, who is still a director there.

One of their two sons, Mr Kee Yi Arn, 40, is managing director of Applied Digital System, as well as a board member at OHF. Another son, Mr Kee Yi Jan, and his wife Begim Suttiyut, both in their 30s, are project managers at the new hotel in Nepal.

Their older sister Laura Kee, 50, is an independent mortgage consultant.

Mr Kee is influenced by the book Halftime (1997), written by American social entrepreneur and author Bob Buford. “He talks about how the first half of one’s life can be devoted to one’s career, while the second half, to helping others.”

Although, in Singapore, he lives in a Balinese-style Holland Road home with a swimming pool, when he visits OHF projects in Cambodia and Nepal, he stays in modest accommodation like his staff.

In the early days, he used to share a room with a staff member at a $30-a-night guesthouse in Cambodia, and ate the same one-dish meals as the kids at the children’s home. He recalls with glee his original name cards printed on A4 paper, which cost a few cents each.

“Comfort is not so important,” he says, recalling how he once brushed his teeth with water from a well in Cambodia, spitting out a tadpole.

One of his great joys is performing as an amateur magician, he says, adding he is a “childish” man who took up magic at the age of 12. He regularly performs magic tricks for OHF’s child beneficiaries even though he is “not so good”, he says.

“When I do my magic show, the child beggars stop begging and become children again,” he says.

He keeps in touch with the children from the homes, now grown up, through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they still call him “grandfather”.

He is “still looking for a successor”, but has no plans to retire, he says. “Retirement is ‘death’. Life is about experience. Don’t experience the same thing again and again. I’m still thinking I might start a project in Africa one day,” he adds.

“It’s wonderful to experience new things, help people, see the joy in their faces and do magic tricks. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing people laugh.”