After a long wait, Nepal has officially become a dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with the signing of a memorandum on Tuesday.

Foreign Secretary Shanker Das Bairagi and SCO Secretary-General Rashid K Alimov inked the memorandum on Tuesday amid a special ceremony held at the SCO Secretariat in Beijing.

The programme was witnessed by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and other senior ministers, who are on an official visit to China.

Nepal had applied for dialogue partner of the SCO in 2007 and in 2015. The 15th SCO Summit held in July last year in Ufa, Russia, decided to grant Nepal the dialogue partner status.

The SCO is a permanent intergovernmental organisation founded in 2001 by the leaders of Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. At present, four countries, Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia, have got observer status while the Ufa summit decided to admit India and Pakistan as full members. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey are the dialogue partners.