Aakriti Ghimire

Aakriti Ghimire (Kathmandu, Nepal) worked behind the scenes for a lawmaker, a minister and the prime minister of Nepal. She holds a B.A. in Legal Studies from NYU Abu Dhabi, where she received the prestigious NYU Founder's Day Award. She served previously as Undersecretary to the Minister of Education, Science and Technology and prior to that was Chief of Staff at Sumana Shrestha Secretariat, part of the Federal Parliament of Nepal. As a journalist, Aakriti served as social affairs correspondent for The Kathmandu Post.

Aakriti is the creator of @howtodeshbikas, a channel which aims to simplify politics and policies. It reached over 14 million people in its first 10 months. She is also the co-founder of Bureaucrazy , which was the runner-up in the 2025 Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge at the Rhodes Forum on Technology and Society.

Her greatest policy interest lies in digitizing. At the Office of the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers, she played a pivotal role in digitizing voter ID registrations, which yielded in an addition of 490,000 additional voters, making up 59% of the total new voters registered for the March 2026 federal elections. Beyond this, she helped institutionalize the parliamentary calendar and introduced the word “plagiarism” into Nepal’s educational policies. She is particularly interested in democratic and digital governance and bureaucracy.