Dear CAN-USA Members.
I wanted to share with you my experience with CAN in Nepal and few people in the IS&T industry and some beauraucrats that I met during my visit to Nepal last month. Few days after my arrival in Kathmandu, I was invited to program organized by CAN on the occasion of Dashain and Tihar. Contrary to my experience from years ago when CAN organized grand parties around Dashain, this program had paper presentations and discussions in a number of different IST related topics. Two separate Papers were presented on “IT Policy and Programs of Government of Nepal” and “Opportunities and Challenges of ICT in Nepal” in moderated sessions. The environment was very professional with the participation of representatives from Ministry of Industry and Commerce, HLCIT, Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, Ministry of Information and Communication, NTC, Office of the Controller of Certification, and individuals from different background. I was invited as one of the speakers, and was impressed by the interest of the attendees for CAN-USA. In approximately 15 minutes of my talk time, I presented CAN-USA and our vision moving forward. My request to the attendees to help us in developing programs to best serve Nepal was very well received and I fielded a lot of questions on what we have done so far, what we plan to do etc. To my surprise, a lot of attendees had heard about CAN-USA although did not know in detail what we really do. People familiar with CAN-USA such as Sanjiv Rajbhandari and Ganesh Shah had good things to say about what we have done so far, and were hopeful we would have some more projects similar to the one we had under Transfer of Knowledge.
I could not attend the NRN pre-conference program organized at IOE pulchowk becuse I did not get the exact details of the nature and timing of the program in advanced and I was out of valley on the day the event was scheduled. But Binod Dhakal, CAN exec represented us and highlighted the joint efforts of CAN and CAN-USA.
In a different event, I had an opportunity to personally visit with most of the CAN execs for a discussion that lasted over an hour. The program was centered around greater collaboration between CAN and CAN-USA. Although we discussed along a lot of different things, here are the major points the discussions circled around:
1. The current optical fibre network is not sufficient to meet the upsurging demand for the information infrastructure. The CAN representatives wanted us to voice the need in order to bring the attention of investors from within the country or aboard.
2. The IT Policy has been drafted but the implementation has been slow and ineffective. The attendees of the meeting wanted us (CAN-USA) to participate in an effort to push the implementation and also in counselling/ suggestion to responsible govt agencies in Nepal or its representatives who visit the US.
3. CAN in Nepal has been expanding in terms of membership at a regional level but the benefits realized by its members have been limited. CAN wants to initiate a drive to request various government, non-government, and multinational agencies to involve local talents and talents of Nepali origin in multinational/international funded IST projects. Not a quota but promoting local entreprenueurs. Their question was how can CAN-USA help.
To summarize, people in the IST arena in Nepal are starting to know about CAN-USA and our programs. The broader IST community in Nepal has started to build expectations from IST professionals around the world and the best organization they know as of now is CAN-USA. CAN in Nepal is looking for more programs/projects/initiatives that will help their members and the IST professionals in Nepal. I think they are looking for some help to design approaches that would be beneficial to the members. They also expect us to highlight some issues such as IT Policy implementation.
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