Building it step by step

Every year, thousands of Nepalis come home. They return with savings, yes, but also with something harder to measure: technical skills, workplace discipline, an understanding of how systems run elsewhere, and networks built over years abroad. Most of that value quietly disperses. Some returnees restart the migration cycle within months. Others open a business without support and close it within the first year.

That gap is why Unfold Nepal exists, and it was the substance of our recent meeting with the Rt. Hon. Dol Prasad Aryal, Speaker of the House of Representatives. We shared who we are, what we are building, and where we believe returnee entrepreneurship can take the country over the next decade.

What we shared

Unfold Nepal is a non-profit working to strengthen Nepal's entrepreneurial ecosystem by helping foreign returnees turn their skills, experience, and ideas into viable businesses at home. We also encourage the wider diaspora to see Nepal as a place to build, not only a place to send money to.

The support we offer follows the actual journey from an idea to a sustainable business:

Our position is simple. Migration should not be read only through the lens of departure. It should also be read through what comes back: knowledge, skills, networks, and experience. When those return and find somewhere useful to land, they create businesses, and businesses create jobs for people who might otherwise have to leave.

The advice we took away

The Speaker listened, and his response was direct. Building an ecosystem is broad, long-term work. Rather than trying to achieve everything at once, he advised us to break the work down step by step and formulate clear strategies for the years ahead, one stage at a time.

"Break the work down. Set clear strategies for each stage rather than attempting the whole ecosystem at once."

— Advice shared by the Rt. Hon. Speaker during the meeting

It is guidance that carries particular weight coming from him. Before taking the chair, he served twice as Nepal's Minister of Labour, Employment and Social Security, the ministry closest to the realities of foreign employment. He has also lived and worked abroad himself. The journey our beneficiaries take is not an abstraction to him.

We have taken the advice seriously. Ambition is easy to state and difficult to sequence, and a non-profit that tries to do everything in its first years usually ends up doing very little well. What follows for us is a phased roadmap: defined milestones, a realistic scope for each year, and honest measurement of whether the businesses we support are still standing twelve and twenty-four months later.

Where this goes next

Conversations at this level matter because returnee entrepreneurship sits across several agendas at once: labour, employment, industry, and finance. Being heard by the House is a step towards the policy attention this group of founders needs, and towards a wider recognition that a returnee with a business plan is an economic asset, not a statistic in a departure record.

We are grateful to the Rt. Hon. Speaker for his time and his counsel. The work now is to turn it into a plan, and the plan into businesses that hold.

Nepal holds boundless potential for entrepreneurship. Our work is to help unfold it.