Report - Nepal's Evolving Data Community

The report highlights the recent progress achieved by Nepal’s data community and important lessons and approaches that can guide the community’s future progress. Over the past years, Nepal's data community has grown rapidly as data and more specifically, open data, is getting recognized as a potential facilitator of improved governance, accountability, innovation, empowerment, and economic growth. As an introduction, the report commences with information on the evolution of open data in Nepal, the variety of stakeholders that facilitated this growth, and the key players in the data community of Nepal. Furthermore, the report delves into major trends in the country that has posed some challenges for the data community such as; range of new social and economic challenges, such as COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in increased data needs, lack of trusted and relevant data available in usable formats to meet these needs, incrased legislative restrictions to data sharing, lack of capacity in regards to data use and growing digital divide that threatens equal access to information. Along with the challenges, the report also highlights some major progress made in this sector such as the increasing trend within the government and non-government sectors in sharing data, increasing demand for data among governments, civil society and the private sector and the growth of Nepal’s open data movement as an important facilitator of progress. Lastly, the report also provides important and new areas which the data community must address moving forward.