# Conclusion

Extreme remoteness and widely varying access to key services are facts of life in Nepal and acknowledged strong determinants of development outcomes. Yet despite this recognition, in practice policy makers and researchers in Nepal rarely quantify these factors and rely on anecdotal, household‐centric or heavily simplified representations of remoteness. As noted in the literature review, existing models are unsatisfactorily abstracted from the travel time‐ based measures commonly employed by Nepal’s government and citizens themselves, while reported travel times from survey data are difficult to generalize because of sampling constraints and highly idiosyncratic besides. This has limited the breadth and rigor of quantitative research based on remoteness and accessibility in Nepal, despite its uniquely strong role in shaping Nepal’s society, governance and economy. Other methods of quantifying accessibility exist, some promising and powerful, but none offered the same mix of analytical power, national coverage, scalability and communicative simplicity of a cost time model, particularly given available data.

The diversity of model inputs and challenge of collecting sufficient data frustrated previous attempts at geospatial modeling of travel times in Nepal. Addressing these challenges required a combination of technical research, consultations with interested partners, persistence in data gathering and tedious data cleaning better suited to our long‐term, country office‐based program than a typical short‐term research project. We were greatly assisted by World Bank staff on the ground and collaboration with the GeoNode open geospatial data sharing project, for which World Bank staff had amassed a considerable amount of geospatial data for Nepal. Despite the overall success of the effort, it must be noted that we could only incompletely collate several important data sets, most notably for education and markets, and therefore exempted them from this analysis.

A mixture of analysis imperatives and policy opportunities guided our research. As this research grew out of the HRVS survey work, we initially intended solely to assess remoteness as it interacted with HRVS survey data.

However, Nepal’s recent transition to a federal administrative structure and the creation of 7 new provinces and 753 new local governments, all without baseline data sets, presented a clear need for quantifying and visualizing accessibility challenges at these various administrative levels. Based on this, we prepared the series of maps, charts and tables accompanying this report. Keeping in mind the sometimes rudimentary state of office infrastructure in remote areas and new government offices in Nepal, we prepared products that were equally useful in digital or print form.

## Analysis

Our research indicates that low average levels of access to services geographically cluster in hill and mountainous regions and the Far West. Population‐weighted shortfalls in cumulative access cluster in the hills and some mountainous areas, especially in the Far West, although pockets of inaccessibility exist in the Shivalik and Terai. The impact of the monsoon is apparent but not as dramatic as feared, suggesting access to essential services deteriorates but does not collapse during the monsoon season. However, we observed a high degree of variability in accessibility patterns across individual local government units; a significant minority of LGUs were outliers from their regional or geographical trends. We therefore encourage readers interested in regional or local implications of this research to consult the appropriate tables, charts and maps for their focus areas from the annexes to learn about the local context.

Making detailed recommendations to rectify these accessibility challenges requires sector‐specific knowledge that is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, we can make some high‐level observations on possible responses. For instance, the Nepal Rastra Bank recognizes that financial services have clustered around urban and semi‐urban areas and barely reach the Mid‐Western and Far‐Western areas (Pant 2016). Promoting alternative delivery channels (e.g. mobile banking) and streamlining the remittance transfer process to avoid