Hami Udhyami

Nepal is facing a looming migrant crisis. More than 500,000 migrants are expected to return home due to COVID-19. Vast majority of them are youth, and 98.5% are unskilled or low-skilled. However, Nepal has neither the employment opportunities nor sufficient training capacity and resources to assimilate them. 

Hami Udhyami is a comprehensive entrepreneurial ecosystem that upskills, connects, and employs returnee migrants through online and tech-enabled offline environments.

Nepal faces a looming crisis. The 5th most remittance-dependent economy in the world, more than 1/4th of Nepal's GDP is supported by remittance. Due to COVID-19, remittance, and with it the economy, is expected to decline rapidly. This is because at least 500,000 migrants, of whom 98.5% are unskilled or low-skilled doing dirty, dangerous, and difficult works (3D), are expected to return home to face conditions which forced them to leave the country at a rate of 1,600/day in the first place.

With lowered remittances, foregone earnings, mounting debt, and rising commodity prices, returnees will be faced with an increased risk of falling into extreme poverty. Compounding this problem is a dearth of employment opportunities, exclusive access to learning, capital and networking opportunities,weak legal protection, discriminatory recruitment processes, and a host of other preexisting social and political issues.

Like Nepal's demography, most migrants are young, with a median-age of 29.5. In Nepal, 69.1% of unemployed in the country are youth between 15 and 34, with 35% of those between 15-24 (2m people) not in education, employment, or training (NEET). Therefore, what is currently a looming migrant crisis, left unchecked, can easily turn into a national demographic crisis.

Hami Udhyami is an entrepreneurship ecosystem with online and tech-enabled offline components that tackles this crisis in two ways.

Online Platform

• Matching Migrants with Startups - Through AI, migrants will be placed in one of our 15+(and growing) partner startups across 9 industries for apprenticeship, internships and on-the-job coaching. The placement is done based on their work history, preference, and location proximity (calculated using GIS and AI). 
• Streamlined Support Services - Streamlined online registration and placement for governmental services including CTEVT (Council for Technical Education and Vocational Training) training programs, capital grant programs like NPC Startup Capital.
• Chatbot-enabled Helpdesk - Real-time virtual pro-bono help by legal as well as industry experts in multiple local languages (nascent NLP) to answer migrants' queries on issues of employment and enterprise building.

Tech-Enabled Offline Environment

• Community Networking - Keeping in mind mobility restrictions faced by migrants, we organize webinars in rural communities with industry leaders and entrepreneurs.
• Professional Workshops - As a lot of migrants preferred face-to-face workshops, we have organized support workshops on issues ranging from financial security, to 'soft-skills' like negotiation, to entrepreneurial skills.
• Community-Building - We organize events like local startup fairs that migrants run for their communities.

We work with migrants between 15 and 34 years. They are from low-income, historically-disadvantaged backgrounds and have been either unable to emigrate or forced to return because of the COVID-19 crisis. They have also consistently revealed indicators of work abuse and exploitation.

All of our solution's components were designed with inputs from migrants at every step of the process. Taking into account technological barriers that exist for them, we had pivoted from a strictly online platform to one that also uses high-tech for low-tech offline environments. Furthermore, we have partnered with supporting organizations like migrant resource centers, national training centers, and local governments to rigorously measure the skill and support gap of migrants.

By developing entrepreneurship development at the community level through low-tech components, Hami Udhyami reduces challenges of technological and social mobility, thereby enhancing the livelihood of migrants who live in marginalized communities. The internship program and the networking opportunities resolves challenges of market access and social constraints for migrants, thereby supporting them in becoming active members of the local economy. Finally, the entrepreneurial learning program allows migrants to gain easy and sustainable access to a set of entrepreneurial skills, as well as becoming creators of job opportunities themselves.

Nepal's economy runs on the power of its youth, of its migrants (who are also young and are returning), and on its SMEs. Equipping them with knowledge and skills is important. However, it is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

Until we also create sustainable mechanisms for their economic and entrepreneurial participation, we cannot create inclusive entrepreneurship. For this reason, our solution also focuses on the first and second dimension. We create enabling environment for employment and entrepreneurship by providing access to network and capital opportunities, as well as provide support through legal help-desks and streamlined support services.