NEPAL OPEN UNIVERSITY

Nepal Open University formally established in 2016 in Nepal, with endorsement of Nepal Open University act by the parliament of Nepal. This is the premier Open University in Nepal with a legal status on par with other universities in the country. It has its main campus in Lalitpur, Nepal.

History of Establishment

The initial formal endeavor of establishing an Open University in Nepal can be traced to 1999, the year when the Government became a signatory of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Consortium to Open and Distance Education. In the Fiscal Year 2008/09, the then Finance Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai in his annual budget speech allocated funding to implement Open University concept in order to provide an opportunity to youths who were deprived of getting education during the conflict period. However, the Nepali government took no concrete action due to the lack of a proper institutional body to initiate implementation of the plan.

Meanwhile, a Canada-based non-profit organization, Canada Forum for Nepal (CFFN) brewing the idea of delivering education to the people living in the economically deprived regions of Nepal since 2007, brought together three North American Nepali Diaspora leaders Dr. Ambika P. Adhikari, Dr. Drona P. Rasali and Dr. Pramod Dhakal and an Australian Nepali Diaspora leader Dr. Raju Adhikari to initiate the issue of establishing Open University in Nepal as one of the prime agenda for the Non-Resident Nepali Association (NRNA)’s International Coordination Council (ICC), which endorsed the Open University of Nepal (OUN) Initiative as its flagship project in 2010.

The NRNA commissioned a Task Force to undertake the tasks of OUN Initiative under the leadership of Dr. Pramod Dhakal. The Task Force worked closely with the Nepalese Ambassadors in Canada and the United States of America as the Government of Nepal's representatives for coordination in the initial work. Later, the NRNA signed an agreement with the Nepal's Ministry of Education that provided official mandate of working on the OUN agenda to NRNA. Nepali Diaspora academics around the world rallied behind the OUN initiative, which turned into an important Diaspora project. Later, a series of Memoranda of Understandings were signed between the Government of Nepal and NRNA (2013, 2014 and 2015) and many workshops, webinars and symposia were held in different parts of the world including Canada, US, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, and Nepal between 2010 and 2016. The places of these meetings, workshops and symposia included Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Houston, Sydney, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur and Kathmandu. Athabasca University (AU), Canada's Open University, located near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, provided technical support, and academic impetus throughout the process of formulating the plan and in the implementation of the program for the OUN. AU's leaders, including its president, vice president and director for distance education travelled to Kathmandu on two occasions and attended several other OUN meetings including in Ottawa, Houston, Sydney and Vancouver. The OUN's original proponents visited the AU, and held several meetings with the AU leaders to understand the working of an open university. Other universities, such as California State University Long Beach in the initiative of Dean Jeet Joshee, and University of Houston also provided technical and moral support in various stage of the development of OUN. In the initiative of Dean Joshee, an online library portal for the Open University of Nepal within Merlot platform has been created for open access 

In 2011, Dr. Pramod Dhakal moved from Canada to Nepal to work solely on volunteering basis to lead the OUN Initiative. In 2011 and 2012, the OUN Initiative team lobbied with the then Prime Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai and several other Nepali leaders and policy makers to establish an interim institutional structure known as Open University Nepal Infrastructure Development Board (OUNIDB) to undertake OUN development activities until the OUN bill was passed by the Nepal's Parliament. Dr. Pramod Dhakal was inducted as NRNA representative to the OUNIDB. He along with and several NRNA leaders and academics met numerous times with the Nepali parliamentarians, ministers, political and academic leaders, and senior level officials to discuss and promote the OUN. This group also intensely lobbied for the passage of the OUN Bill in the Nepali parliament. Dr. Pramod Dhakal worked full-time to move the OUN agenda forward and wrote numerous reports, policy documents, and contributed in the development of drafts of the OUN bill, agreements between NRNA and the Government of Nepal and Athabasca University, and several other background documents.

In two instances, the legislative bills for OUN were tabled in the Legislature Parliament of Nepal. First one was aborted due to dissolution of the Parliament in May 2012. The second bill was passed by the Parliament on June 30, 2016. In this process, the Himalyan Times, a national daily in Kathmandu underscored the efforts of the NRNA's Open University of Nepal Initiative Task Force as commendable work by working together with the Ministry of Education since 2011 to bring the BillFinally, the OUN was established under the Nepal Open University Act 2073, signed by the President of Nepal on July 14, 2016.