When protesters took to the streets in Nepal’s capital this week, expressions of anger and disappointment that had built up for years were ignited. The government’s ban on major social media platforms a few days before had only lit the fuse.

Declaring themselves to be the voice of Nepal’s Gen Z, the protesters were expressing not only outrage at the official violence that met them on the streets on Monday, but also at longstanding social problems that have afflicted Nepal during the 10 years since it replaced its monarchy with a democratic republic.

On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli and other ministers resigned, but the reckoning has only begun.

Unemployment and Inequity

The country’s biggest slow-burning crisis centers on jobs. Getting one is a herculean task in Nepal, a mountainous nation of 30 million sandwiched between India and China. According to the Nepal Living Standard Survey published by the National Statistics Office in 2024, the unemployment rate was 12.6 percent, more than a point higher than it was five years earlier.

Those figures tend to understate the severity of the problem. They represent only participants in the formal economy, leaving out the majority of Nepalis, who work without officially reported jobs, mostly in farming. And the unemployment is heavily concentrated among younger adults who hold out hope for real jobs.

Finding no opportunities at home, hundreds of young men and women leave the country every day to serve long-term contracts in the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf and Malaysia. Tens of thousands work in India as seasonal migrant laborers. Government data show that more than 741,000 left the country last year, mainly to find work in construction or agriculture.