No country for young people: Nepal’s Gen Z sees little hope at home

By Anupreeta Das

KATHMANDU — In his hometown, Chamkhar, a tiny village of breathtaking beauty tucked into the hillside about an hour away from Nepal’s capital, Rajendra Tamang sits plotting his future.

The golden fields of corn, verdant slopes and imposing views of Himalayan peaks hold little opportunity. Neither does the rest of Nepal, Tamang, 22, said. Jobs are scarce and competition is fierce, even for low-paying work. Wealth disparity is high and corruption is endemic.

Two years ago, Tamang moved to Dubai, where he worked 16-hour days, six days a week, switching between jobs as an office peon, a cleaner and a warehouse worker. He earned four times the salary he could expect in Nepal, but the gruelling shifts wore him down. As he browsed Dubai’s malls on his days off, he noticed that baristas and secretaries were in demand.

Adding such skills to his resume could increase his employability, Tamang reasoned. So he came home and enrolled in a two-month barista training course in Nepal. He learned how to operate a coffee machine, the difference between a cold brew and an iced coffee, and how to draw pretty patterns in cappuccino foam. He is hoping that his skills will distinguish him from the tens of thousands of Nepalis who are also looking for jobs overseas.

“I just don’t want to work in Nepal,” Tamang said. “You have to get out.”

Sick of Corruption

In tiny hamlets and passport lines, on the streets and inside chic cafes, many young Nepalis — whether they are college graduates or never finished school — say they feel hopeless and frustrated.

Persistently high unemployment and inadequate investment in skills training have hurt economic growth. The country relies heavily on remittances sent home by citizens working abroad, which equal about a third of Nepal’s gross domestic product. At the same time, many Nepalis say they experience corruption in their everyday dealings with bureaucracy, and an entrenched elite is widely seen as having reaped ill-gotten gains.

Those feelings morphed into rage in early September, when thousands of students took to the streets to vent their anger at corruption, in what came to be known as the Gen Z protests. The immediate trigger was a social media ban — which coincided with a viral surge of memes targeting “nepo kids,” the privileged children of the elite. The protests spiralled into a nationwide arson rampage and led to the downfall of Nepal’s government.

“The Gen Z protest was a necessary movement for change,” said Lal Bahadur Ghising, 32, a cabdriver who spent two years working in Malaysia and used his savings to buy a taxi, which he now drives full time. “Bribery is rampant.”

Nepal is one of Asia’s most corrupt countries, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be.

Many officials and contractors skim money from government contracts, said Ashish Thapa, the executive director of Transparency International Nepal. More than half of that money stays in Nepal, often used to buy land and homes and to invest in businesses, he said.

But the protests were about more than corruption. They spotlighted the long-standing realities of a large, young population facing an uncertain future.

Pressure to Leave

Five days after the student protests, as the capital, Kathmandu, returned to calm, the Department of Passports was bustling as usual. Hundreds of people clutching documents stood in a line that grew by the minute, sloping into the building’s pitch-black basement parking lot. Most were young, and many were applying for their first passports.

Sunita Bishwakarma, 29, had arrived at 9:00 a.m., an hour before the office opened. Bishwakarma, who is unemployed, has no immediate plans to go abroad but said her brother, who works as a security guard in Kuwait, had urged her to apply for her passport.

“If you go abroad, at least it’s a better place,” Bishwakarma said he told her. Bishwakarma said she would rather raise her three boys in Nepal, but the recent turmoil and the overall state of the economy gave her little hope. “It forces us to leave,” she said.

Grim statistics about the economy abound. In 2023, the Nepal Living Standards Survey found that nearly a quarter of Nepalis between the ages of 15 and 24 were unemployed, almost double the rate of the overall population. The number of Nepalis working abroad almost tripled, to 2.2 million, in the two decades leading to 2021, according to government data. Roughly three-quarters of Nepali emigrants were between the ages of 15 and 34.

Agriculture remains the lifeblood of Nepal’s economy, but in towns and cities, the internet has opened up new opportunities. Ride-hailing apps have helped cabdrivers find more customers. People have found digital marketing jobs. Local businesses are growing through their online presence.

But Roji Lama, who has a business degree from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, said Nepal doesn’t have the infrastructure to support entrepreneurship. “For any country to develop, there has to be development of technology, transportation, food and water, facilities,” said Lama, who works as a cabdriver and hopes to build his own business.

A Labor Mill

Nepal, with a population of about 30 million, provides a steady supply of unskilled labour to Gulf countries, but also to European ones such as Portugal and Greece. Young Nepalis pack boxes in warehouses, chop vegetables in restaurant kitchens and drive trucks at construction sites.

Roughly 1 in 4 households in Nepal has a family member abroad, according to government data. For families, that often means a cruel trade-off between the grief of separation for years at a time and the need for money. The remittances sustain households, pay school fees and medical bills, and help to rebuild homes in a country prone to natural disasters like floods and earthquakes.

“To save, or even live properly, someone from the family has to go out,” said Tenzin Dolker, a college student in Kathmandu who studies computer science. “It’s almost like an unsaid tradition.”

Nearly two decades ago, when Dolker was 6 years old, her mother left Nepal to work as a caretaker in Israel. She stayed for 15 years, returning to visit just three times, Dolker said.

But “she earned money in Israel and built her house here,” Dolker said. Her mother, who is now back for good, could never have saved that much working in Nepal, she said.

Recruiters offer two-year “free visa, free ticket” contracts that are popular despite onerous working conditions and the potential for exploitation. Tamang, the newly trained barista, said he had been told he would work eight hours a day in Dubai, but ended up working 16-hour shifts.

The ‘Nepo Kids’

With more than 1 million Instagram followers, Shrinkhala Khatiwada, a former Miss Nepal and a Harvard University graduate, was an inspiration for many Nepali youngsters. She spoke eloquently — often about politics — and became a prominent voice of her generation.

Her accomplishments put Nepal “in the limelight,” said Prijma Limbu, who lives in London but was visiting family in Kathmandu. She follows young Nepali influencers to keep up with trends in the country of her birth. “I was like, she’s really nice — intelligent, smart, very inspiring to a lot of people,” Limbu, 21, said.

But in the days leading up to the Gen Z protests, Khatiwada was targeted as a “nepo kid” for taking foreign vacations and endorsing luxury brands. She lost many of her Instagram followers. Khatiwada’s father is a former health minister, and her husband’s father owns Nepal’s biggest media conglomerate.

Limbu said Khatiwada was a “disappointment” for not supporting the protesters. “Because people looked up to her so much, people were expecting that she would do something about it, post something about it, and she didn’t,” Limbu said. Homes belonging to relatives of Khatiwada were among those burned during the protests. Khatiwada said in an interview that she had wanted to promote the protesters’ cause, but that she was shocked “at being painted as its enemy.”

“My silence was not born of privilege or indifference; it came from trauma and shock,” she said. Asked whether she had benefited from tainted money, she said, “I never gained from ill-gotten gains.”

Some young people see the protests’ impact as fleeting: a flash mob of anger, displayed by educated, middle-class people toward a small elite class. They say the demonstrations are unlikely to improve their everyday lives or make them want to stay in the country. If anything, they say, the disruption and uncertainty they caused have made things worse.

“For teenagers, it hasn’t changed much,” Dolker said. “Now they’re like, ‘I have to leave even sooner.’”

-New York Times