Losing Vital Intergenerational Knowledge A Silent Crisis
Because Nepal’s education system was historically inaccessible to the general public until the democratic opening in 1950 and this systemic exclusion has created a significant intergenerational education gap, now deepened by the rapid pace of digital transformation. Their inclusion in digital policy-making strengthens social cohesion, enhances public trust, and ensures that digital systems are rooted in Nepali values and realities.
As Nepal advances initiatives like the Digital Nepal Framework, AI Strategy, and Cybersecurity Legislation, there is a failure to include older generations — especially senior female citizens — in policy design, consultation, and protection frameworks presents ethical, cultural, and strategic risks.
In the digital era, the legacy of educational exclusion has become a digital and cognitive vulnerability, exposing senior citizens to misinformation and political disinformation, online scams, phishing, and identity theft, digital exclusion from e-governance, healthcare, finance, and social services and social isolation and declining trust in public digital systems. Senior women, in particular, remain invisible in policy spaces despite being key cultural anchors, informal caregivers, and knowledge-bearers in Nepali society.
Nepal cannot afford a digital divide that mirrors — or worsens — historical injustices. Protecting and empowering older generations, especially women, is not charity; it is smart, just, and strategic governance. Older adults are disproportionately targeted by digital fraud and misinformation campaigns. National digital policies are youth-centered, leaving behind a significant part of the population. Elderly women, doubly disadvantaged by past gender norms and lack of access to education, remain unrepresented in national dialogues on ICT, AI, or cybersecurity. Exclusion of elders from digital systems weakens intergenerational trust and transmission of values.
Our institution DHMA is advocating for establishing a functional Senior Citizens’ Digital Advisory Council under the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology (MoCIT), with representation from women’s groups, rural communities, and provincial bodies including appointment of Elderly Representatives in Cybersecurity, Data Protection, and AI Ethics Councils, especially women leaders from local communities. Senior citizens should be defined as a protected digital category in the upcoming Cybersecurity Bill and Data Protection legislation. Media campaigns should highlight the resilience and wisdom of older generations and encourage their role as co-creators of digital culture, not just passive users integrating oral histories and lived experiences of senior women into civic education and digital storytelling platforms. We must not only protect older generations from digital risks — we must meaningfully engage them as stakeholders in our digital future. The same resilience with which they survived an education-deprived era can be harnessed now to help Nepal thrive in the AI age. Let us recognize their value — and build a truly inclusive, intergenerational, and ethical digital Nepal.
Nepal’s older generation — particularly senior women — are living repositories of cultural memory, indigenous knowledge, caregiving wisdom, and linguistic diversity. Yet, due to their digital and educational marginalization, we are on the brink of losing a vast body of intergenerational knowledge that has been orally transmitted for centuries.
Without deliberate policies to digitally empower and document the voices, practices, and stories of senior citizens, especially women. As local dialects and oral histories fade, so does cultural identity. Traditional remedies, agricultural practices, and climate-resilient techniques may vanish if not preserved digitally. Elders often pass down moral frameworks, social resilience, and conflict resolution methods — crucial for civic harmony in a time of polarization. When young people lack access to elders’ stories, struggles, and wisdom, it fosters generational disconnect and cultural dislocation.
Nepal government should allocate budget for digitally documenting the lived experiences and wisdom of older generations by engaging senior women in intergenerational learning programs, pairing them with youth to co-create oral history archives and community knowledge banks and create incentives for AI-powered cultural preservation platforms that record, translate, and share elders’ knowledge in accessible formats. This is not nostalgia — it is strategic national preservation. In a rapidly digitizing world, nations that fail to integrate the past into the digital future risk not only cultural amnesia but weakened social cohesion.