Nepal has roughly $53 billion sitting in bank deposits. Around $14 billion enters the country each year through remittances. Its technology sector is now estimated to export more than $1 billion in services. Yet, promising Nepali enterprises still struggle to find the capital, capabilities and markets they need to scale.

That paradox has become harder to ignore as traditional development finance contracts. Official development assistance fell by 23 percent globally in 2025, its largest annual contraction on record, with a further decline projected in 2026. Nepal is simultaneously preparing to graduate from the Least Developed Country status, even as AI rapidly reshapes economies, organisations and the capabilities they need.

Perhaps, then, the question is not only what Nepal lacks. It is why so much of what we already have remains difficult to connect, mobilise and scale.

For me, that question became personal over the past year. After nearly two decades in international development, including more than a decade at USAID, I found myself reconsidering some of the assumptions that had shaped my own career: what was worth carrying forward, what needed to change, and where institutions like ours could add distinctive value.

Over the year, our team worked across all seven provinces and encountered the same paradox.

Entrepreneurs were looking for investors; investors for investment-ready enterprises. Universities were producing graduates; employers were struggling to find the capabilities they needed. Researchers were generating useful evidence, but practitioners often struggled to find, translate or apply it. Development organisations were piloting solutions; businesses with the technology, networks or commercial incentives to help them scale were often not in the same room. More than a shortage of effort, ideas or resources, the constraint was the pathways between them.

We talk a great deal about physical infrastructure in Nepal, and rightly so. But economies also depend on intangible infrastructure: trust, relationships, shared knowledge, credible intermediaries and networks that allow capital, talent and ideas to find one another—and promising solutions to scale.

For instance, $7,200 from FCDO’s Nepal in Business-Growth Advisors programme funded an investment-readiness initiative that we delivered for Nepali technology companies. One participant, Raindrop, went on to secure a strategic partner who brings deep expertise as well as investment of approximately $131,000—more than 18 times that initial investment.

Consider the wider capital landscape: roughly $53 billion in bank deposits, $39 billion in lending, and around $14 billion in annual remittances, compared with a federal capital budget of about $14 billion and roughly $400 million in foreign grants. Capital and opportunity exist, but the structures, information, incentives and trust that allow them to meet often do not.

When grants can no longer be assumed—or sustained at familiar scale—what other assets do organisations have to work with? Quite a lot: community trust; deep local networks; institutional knowledge of what localisation, inclusion and equity require in practice; relationships across sectors; data; convening power; and implementation capability.

These assets have economic value too. Private capital cannot replace public or philanthropic resources where markets cannot or will not go. But development resources should be judged not only by what they finance, but by what they unlock: the risk absorbed, institution strengthened, evidence generated, relationship brokered, capability left behind or capital subsequently moved.

So the questions should not only be ‘what did we spend?’, ‘what did we deliver?’, and ‘how many people did we reach?’ But also ‘what did we unlock?’, ‘what became possible because we were there?’, and ‘what keeps moving when we’re gone?’

The same shift, from looking for what is missing to recognising what already exists, raises a larger question: Could this disruption also change how countries like Nepal are seen globally?

For decades, countries like ours have occupied a familiar position in the global development architecture—recipients of money, expertise, technology and ideas.

But Nepal is also a source of them. Companies like Programiz, Veel and SecurityPal AI are building from Nepal for global markets, and industry estimates put Nepal’s IT services exports at over $1 billion. Pukar Hamal, founder of SecurityPal AI, describes this potential as ‘Silicon Peaks’—a vision of Nepal not simply as a source of global talent, but as a place where technology, companies and ideas can be built for the world.

Add to that a diaspora carrying expertise, relationships and capital across borders, communities and institutions with knowledge outsiders do not possess, and a generation of young Nepalis whose professional and technological horizons are increasingly global.

The next chapter of Nepal’s growth must be as much about recognising, connecting, investing in and amplifying existing strengths as filling gaps.

Perhaps the opportunity, then, is not simply to attract more resources into Nepal, but to build pathways that allow what Nepal already has to reach further—to opportunities at home, capital and markets abroad, and problems elsewhere that Nepali talent and enterprise can help solve.

Nepal’s greatest untapped potential may lie not in any single institution, sector or source of capital, but in what becomes possible when their strengths come together.

We already have many of the ingredients. The opportunity is to make it easier for these assets to find and reinforce one another, at home and across borders.

Nepal does not sit outside that global village waiting to be helped. We are already part of it, with locally brewed talent, knowledge systems, enterprise and solutions to contribute. But a village is not simply a network to draw from. It requires reciprocity: contributing as well as receiving, sharing what we know and have, and investing in one another's success.

A village is not made strong by its individual houses, but by the roads between them, and people choosing to use them. Those are the roads I want us to continue strengthening: between entrepreneurs and investors, universities and businesses, communities and markets, public purpose and private initiative, Nepal and the world.

Locally led, globally connected. Because when the right ideas find the right support, what begins here can go much further.