ICT Country Report of Nepal

ICT Country Report Of Nepal, highlights the political unrest as a major bottleneck in impeding Nepal’s ICT and national development, asserts that the government needs to translate the political commitment and policies into real action. The report further underlines the need to promote private sector participation for sustainable ICT development by contrasting the private sector's participation in mobile telecommunication with its exclusion from the tele-center, IT Park, and e-village projects. Private sector participation led to numerous successes in the mobile telecommunication endeavors while its exclusion from the three aforementioned projects condemned them to failure. It proposes Nepal to follow strategies used by successful economies such as Korea until it reaches a certain stage, after which it may require adopting a different path or strategy to achieve its goal, for which Nepal needs to pay special attention to stimulating key actors and collaboration among them in the IT industry.

Nepal’s ICT Policy 2015 encourages small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and has a provision of a special fund for business incubation of ICT services. This document strongly suggests Nepal to take the experience of the Korean case of supporting SMEs by adopting an SME-friendly ICT policy, opening the doors to invite SMEs in the ICT sector by subsidizing taxes, and providing ICT trainings and incubation centers. On a different note, citing the efforts of an NGO’s exploring of data to create values and address the challenges and problems faced during the devastating 2015 earthquake in Nepal and recommends the government to take measures for opening the government data.