Daayitwa: Fostering young talents in governance and entrepreneurship

Fellowship is the flagship program of Daayitwa. The journey that started in 2013 has continuously and directly worked towards bridging the trust-gap between Nepali youth and the government while strongly emphasizing the importance of use of evidence in policy making. Under the umbrella of Daayitwa Nepal Public Service Fellowship (DNPSF), Daayitwa offers two different programs, the Daayitwa Nepal Public Policy Fellowship (DNPPF) and the Daayitwa Nepal Public Administration Fellowship (DNPAF). The former one supports the federal government in conducting evidence-based policy research and the latter provides policy research, implementation and administrative support to the local municipal governments.

Daayitwa Nepal Public Service Fellowship (DNPSF) has a unique model that creates rare opportunities for young talents to collaborate and work in close coordination with the government as well as Parliamentarians at all levels. DNPSF competitively selects and places young professionals and students in public agencies and with parliamentarians for 3-6 months, builds their technical and adaptive capacities and enables them to provide research or implementation support to their public partners. 

During the past nine years, from 2013 to 2021, Daayitwa fellowship has supported 164 young Nepali policy professionals from 30 countries to conduct research projects for 74 government organizations as well as 25 parliamentarians at federal, provincial and municipal levels on policies related to access to investment, women’s economic empowerment, enterprise value chain, youth employment and economic governance. Daayitwa Nepal Public Policy Fellowship The Daayitwa Nepal Public Policy Fellowship is a program where young professionals collaborate with the government to conduct economic policy research and promote evidence-based policy decisions. The mission is to ignite self-responsibility for public service in Nepali youth by nurturing their collaborative leadership towards an enterprising Nepal.  It has three major goals:

1. Support the government and political representatives in addressing critical needs of priority projects
2. Strengthen innovation and leadership capacity of youth through engagement in government projects
3. Build a collaborative community of young policy entrepreneurs, action-oriented policy-makers and policy experts in promoting innovation in the governance system

This collaborative initiative has become an action-platform for Nepali students and young professionals, both inside and outside the country. The 12th cohort of DNPPF  started in June 2022 with six fellows placed with three Parliamentarians (Hon. Gagan Thapa, Hon. Gokarna Bista and Hon. Kamala Roka) and two government organizations (National Planning Commission and Ministry of Communication and Technology).  Young Nepali professionals with varied backgrounds will finish their fellowship journey this December. During their fellowship, apart from the immense learning through a rare and close-up engagement with the public partners, the fellows also partake in a leadership course provided by Dr. Pukar Malla, former Senior Fellow at Harvard Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, and research training sessions provided by experts like Dr. Charity Troyer Moore, Director for South Asian Economics Research at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. The fellows will also receive a public administration course along with mentorship provided by researchers at the Governance Lab. “Like many youths, I too was passionate about working in Nepal's local economic development at a policy level. I wasn’t quite sure though, about how or where to begin. As a public policy fellow at the National Planning Commission (NPC), DNPPF provided me with the right resources, network and training needed for me to commence my journey of policy leadership”, Raj Kharel, Daayitwa Fellow 2020. Daayitwa Nepal Public Administration Fellowship The Daayitwa Nepal Public Administration Fellowship program places fellows at the local government  institutions to support public officials and elected representatives of local municipal governments in researching, formulating, and implementing local policies and programs.  This opens the door to the local youths to collaborate and work together with their local governments, and vice-versa.  Recently, 38 DNPAF fellows of 2021 and 2022 cycle graduated. Those 38 fellows were placed at 34 local bodies across six provinces of Nepal. The DNPAF Fellows are placed for a full-time engagement within their respective local municipal governments for four months. “All my expectations were surpassed from this fellowship program. My basic expectations were just being able to work with the local government and be more involved. However, after joining the Daayitwa Nepal Public Administration Fellowship 2021, I was able to do so much more with all the training, guidance and supervision provided. My coordination skills have evolved over time and I am able to build a good network with other youths within my municipality. As a Daayitwa Fellow, I got the opportunity to work with the local government very closely which helped me to unlearn the misunderstanding that was in my young mind. I used to believe that the youth can never work along with the government as it is very difficult to coordinate with them. However now, I believe that it is possible to coordinate and collaborate with the government, and the local government will actually accept our ideas too. My work was very much appreciated by the representatives and officials of the municipality. Apart from understanding the government and its work, this fellowship also helped me understand how the local civil society organizations work at the municipal level. Overall, I believe my confidence has increased. I am now able to coordinate and communicate much better. I am happy that I could also learn the tools and techniques of conducting professional research and apply those learnings right away. The training on leadership was a real eye-opener, Dikshya Dulal, Daayitwa Fellow 2021” Daayitwa is a Nepali non-profit, non-governmental organization that envisions an  enterprising Nepal, where every individual has opportunities for a prosperous future. To reach the larger vision, Daayitwa works on the sector of governance and entrepreneurship, and the fellowship programs fall under governance.