Building a tech nation without the builders

Nepal’s IT boom is real. So is the exodus draining it.

Nepal is building something real in the global technology economy. In 2025, its IT sector crossed $1 billion in annual service exports, more than doubling in three years. The government has responded with a ten-year plan: $22 billion in cumulative IT exports and 500,000 new tech jobs by 2035.

There is one problem the plan does not address. The people who would build all of this are leaving.

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Here is how the export numbers have moved.

Nepal’s IT exports nearly tripled between 2022 and 2025. That growth is real. But the sector currently employs only around 100,000 people, and 90% of them are in Kathmandu.

The government target requires growing the workforce fivefold in ten years. The plan does not say where those workers come from.

Sources: World Bank ICT services exports (2019-2021); IIDS survey (2022); NASIT industry estimates (2023-2025). Post-2022 figures are industry estimates, not formally audited. A share of earnings arrives in Nepal labelled as personal remittance, which makes exact tracking difficult (Kathmandu Post, 2026).

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Now look at who is leaving.

Nepal’s brain drain score has sat between 6.1 and 7.0 for 17 years. It barely moves. The world average is 4.98. Nepal is well above it.

Compare it to India. In 2007, India’s score was 7.1. By 2024 it was down to 4.8. That drop happened because India’s domestic tech sector grew large enough to offer real salaries and real careers. Workers found a reason to stay.

Nepal has not done that. Its score peaked at 7.0 in 2015, the year of the earthquakes, and has barely moved since. A December 2024 study in the Far Western Review found that the professionals most likely to leave Nepal are engineers, scientists, and IT specialists. Those are exactly the people the IT Decade needs.

Source: Fund for Peace, Human Flight and Brain Drain sub-indicator, Fragile States Index, via TheGlobalEconomy.com (2007-2024). Years without confirmed values are interpolated linearly between documented anchor points. Sri Lanka data available to 2023 only.

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This chart puts the two problems side by side.

Every year Nepal approves roughly 780,000 workers to emigrate across all industries. The entire IT sector fits inside that number with room to spare.

The government target assumes the tech workforce grows from 100,000 to 500,000 by 2035. That is 400,000 additional workers over ten years, in a country where tech salaries are low, research infrastructure is thin, and political instability has been a constant in the background of most careers.

None of those conditions appear in the IT Decade roadmap.

Sources: IT workforce 2022, IIDS survey; IT workforce 2025, NASIT via Kathmandu Post (Feb 2026); Government target, Nepal Budget 2024-25; Emigration approvals, Nepal Dept of Foreign Employment 2022-23 via The Financial Express Bangladesh. Emigration figure covers all sectors.

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Who builds Nepal’s tech future?

The $1 billion export figure is real. The 500,000-job target is not impossible. But both rest on a workforce that is, right now, leaving.

There are some genuine grounds for optimism. Nepali diaspora members working in the US, Australia, and the Gulf are sending money back, and sometimes contracts too. Several IT companies in Kathmandu were started by people who left and returned. That is real, and easy to overlook.

But returned diaspora members alone cannot fix what is pushing people out. Until Nepal addresses what India has been slowly addressing over seventeen years, pay, infrastructure, stability, it will keep producing the talent that other economies collect.

The IT Decade starts now. Whether the builders are still here when it matters is a different question.

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References

Chand, A. (2026, February 25). Nepal’s IT exports near $1 billion. Can the momentum be sustained? Kathmandu Post. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/02/25/nepal-s-it-exports-near-1-billion-can-the-momentum-be-sustained

Fund for Peace. (2024). Fragile States Index: Human flight and brain drain sub-indicator. TheGlobalEconomy.com. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Nepal/human_flight_brain_drain_index/

Institute for Integrated Development Studies. (2022). Unleashing Nepal’s IT export potential. IIDS. https://iids.org.np/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/unleashing.pdf

Nepal Association for Software and IT Services. (2025). IT export estimate. Cited in Kathmandu Post (2026, February 25).

Nepal Department of Foreign Employment. (2024). Foreign employment statistics 2022-23. Via The Financial Express Bangladesh. https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/views/opinions/brain-drain-from-south-asia-what-to-do

Pandey, G. (2026, February 12). Nepal’s IT service exports reach estimated Rs145 billion annually. Fiscal Nepal. https://www.fiscalnepal.com/2026/02/12/24432/

Rajbhandari, P., Darna, S., & Pote, A. (2024). The exodus of talent: Analyzing brain drain in Nepal. Far Western Review, 2(2), 26-38. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392542611_The_Exodus_of_Talent_Analyzing_Brain_Drain_in_Nepal

World Bank. (2024). ICT service exports (BoP, current US$): Nepal. World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.GSR.CCIS.CD?locations=NP