Reports and Analysis

Nepal experienced incessant rainfall from August 11 to 14, 2017, resulting in widespread floods across 35 of the country’s 77 districts. Several districts experienced the heaviest rainfall in over 60 years. This led to the inundation of about 80 percent of the land in substantial parts of the Terai region.

Floods have historically resulted from a combination of the following natural factors in Nepal: continuous rainfall and cloudbursts, snowmelt and rainfall, glacial lake outburst floods and bishyari (breaking of dams caused by landslides falling directly into rivers).

The Asia and the Pacific region includes the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic countries and is a key driver of growth in the world economy.

Deep and rapid structural transformation, the presence of large emerging markets, high remittances and strong demand for exports combined to ensure economic growth rates in 2016 of between 6 and 7 per cent.

Importantly, strong growth has led to rapid declines in poverty and has even benefited rural populations, with more people producing highervalue
products such as vegetables, livestock and fish.

The report shows that the overall trend globally is toward continued human development improvement. Out of the 189 countries for which the Human Development Index is calculated, 59 countries are today in the very high human development group and only 38 countries fall in the low HDI group. Just eight years ago in 2010, the figures were 46 and 49 countries respectively. Today on average people are living longer, are more educated and have greater income than ever before.

With large number of vulnerable houses, Nepal faces a huge extant risk from future earthquakes. While compliance to the national building codes is increasing for the new buildings, existing non-code compliant buildings pose a huge threat to the occupants. It has been difficult to promote retrofitting of residential buildings in major urban and urbanizing cities across Nepal.

This series of five children’s books on environmental issues was produced by the Children’s Literature and Research Center with the support of the Community-Based Flood and Glacial Lake Outburst Risk Reduction Project (CFGORRP)—a joint initiative of the Government of Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology and UNDP, funded by the Global Environment Facility.

This book highlights the landscape of indigenous women in Nepal and find out more about the challenges and opportunities of their economic development. UNDP Nepal in partnership with National Indigenous Women’s Federation initiated this research with an objective to deepen the understanding on economic status of indigenous women particularly whether they are able to exercise their rights as provisioned by the Government’s plans and policies, and inform the concerned stakeholders on the effective measures to address the specific needs for economic empowerment of indigenous women.

The MAP Nepal Roadmap and Action Plan was produced as part of the MAP Nepal Initiative. The Making Access Possible (MAP) Nepal Financial Inclusion Action Plan outlines the short and long-term strategies and identifies specific activities that can be undertaken by the government to achieve the priorities outlined in the MAP Nepal Financial Inclusion Roadmap 2017-2030. The MAP Nepal Roadmap and Action Plan intends to assist the government as well as private stakeholders to work towards the common goal of increased financial inclusion.

UNNATI–Access to Finance (A2F) is a sub-component of UNNATI project funded by the Government of Denmark and implemented by Nepal Rastra Bank with technical support from UNCDF. The purpose of the UNNATI-A2F project is to support financial service providers to more effectively serve the agricultural value chain actors providing appropriate financial products and services. The project is already partnering with a number of commercial banks and micro-finance institutions in this regard.

Volunteering is increasingly recognized as a significant resource for overcoming development challenges. Empirical data can document the contributions of volunteers, set benchmarks for evaluation, uncover important trends, and encourage policies that help promote volunteering. Today, UNV publishes a background paper as part of the 2018 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report project, that assesses the state of measurement of volunteering, and provides new estimations of the scale and scope of volunteering globally.

The UNV Strategic Framework, 2018-2021, builds on the previous framework for 2014-2017. The first strategic framework since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it seeks to leverage the power of volunteerism and volunteers as a means of implementation and people engagement for attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To this end, the Strategic Framework focuses on two main outcomes and on institutional effectiveness.