Background

Just like other countries spread across the world, Nepal is also a developing country emerging highly on the field of digitalization, embarking upon the journey of digital transformation leaving behind its primitive methodologies. With the word digital transformation, one can simply mean process of use of current digital technologies to create new products and services as well as improve old ones too. Digital transformation is a necessity in order to increase innovation, invention, efficiency and customer experience.

Objective

The main goal of digital transformation isn’t just to randomly adapt different technologies in every sector of daily Nepalese life, but to strategically add proper technologies in different sectors such that value provided by each sector to the clients is higher than the ones provided by traditional methods. Some of the advantages of digital transformation might be helps to stay up-to-date with current trends and technologies, makes easier user experience of higher quality, encourages innovation, promotes efficiency and productivity, and gives a proper foundation for scalability of businesses.

Right now, the main goal of digital transformation implemented in Nepal is to have accessible modern infrastructure with intensive connectivity across every part of the country. One of the good things the massive lockdown brought by COVID-19 would be increased digitalization in Nepal. This most of all included the massive shift on education. Almost every schools, colleges and any other educational institutions started teaching through online classes instead of the physical ones. As a result every house became a home to a collective digitalization. Payments have also became digitalized via services like eSewa, Khalti and so on. Banking and financial services can be found in every mobile phone right now. College fees, salaries to employees, or even simple daily life payments like restaurant payments, pathao payments are done via digital means nowadays. With over 40,000 e-commerce sites operating in the country, businesses and individuals are now able to access a wide range of products and services at their fingertips. So, it is easily understandable how Nepal is and will be advancing through digitalization in current and future scenarios.

Problems

While there are number of benefits regarding digitalization, there still are a lot of barriers regarding local digitalization in Nepal. First and foremost, there is not enough digital literacy amongst the people and so is the acceptance rate of digitalization. Due to unclear or outdated legislation, innovative tech startups struggle to comply with the law. So, newer startups find it hard and discouraging to kickstart in Nepal. For example, when a startup company tries for registration while getting bound by laws of Nepalese government. It might just not find the right category it supposed fits into. Not only the rules, but also many tech related students in Nepal dont even stay in Nepal at all. Most of them either go abroad or choose different career paths, thus causing lack of skilled manpower. Unlike the neighboring developed countries like India and China, there just isn’t enough IT parks for employees to work on. This means lack of good IT infrastructure and thus, it would automatically encourage students to move abroad just after graduation. A final hindrance to digitalization in Nepal, in my opinion, would be lack of collaboration among existent companies. 

Despite of having problems in achieving Digital Nepal, it won’t be able to stop the whole digital transformation. Thus, digital transformation is and will be a big thing to innovate current and future Nepal.