National Guidelines in Nepal - National Planning Commission Secretariat

Five Year Plans

At national level, government policies have tried to respond to women's problems in various ways. The previous Five-Year Plans emphasized women's involvement in all programs and projects, recognized legal impediments to their economic empowerment, and enunciated special programs for meeting their needs. Required legal reforms were also to be implemented to facilitate women's participation in development.

The Eighth Five-Year Plan (1993-1997), in particular, recognized the need for increasing women's representation at decision-making levels in the government, nongovernmental and semi-government sectors, and for developing a monitoring system for recording gender discrimination at work. During the Eighth Plan period, the Government formulated and presented an Action Plan in the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 4-15 September 1995).

The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1997-2002) sets the objective of developing society on the basis of gender equality, women's empowerment and participation through gender mainstreaming in all sectors of national development. The main objectives of the Ninth Plan development policy are specified to involve women actively in various development fields, to increase women's access to political, economic, and social sectors, and to promulgate legal reforms to ensure women's equal legal rights. Equal participation of women is to be promoted by incorporating specific policies and programs for women in sectoral development policies and plans. Special laws are promised for increasing women's participation at all levels of decision making, for establishing women's rights in landownership and for technical training in all fields. Initiatives to improve laws specially concern acts relating to land settlement, Legal Aid Act, compensation, partition of property, provisions of family law, compensation against torture Act.

The Ninth Plan intends to mainstream women into the planning process through training, education and promotion of women's groups. The focuses of this programme are skill promotion, income generation, empowerment, capacity building and employment creation etc.. There are some women focus education programmes such as alternative schooling, out of school programmes, incentive programmes for girls and disadvantaged children through formal and non formal education. The Ninth plan includes also the assessment of women's contribution to household labour within the national accounting system; the development of gender-disaggregated indicators to measure women's participation in development and an effective co-ordination between agencies and bodies engaged in the field of women's development.

Specifically, policies enunciated are divided under three major parts:

1. Mainstreaming, which includes:
   1. Formulation of clear policies, targets, and programs at national and regional levels;
   2. Inclusion of women's contributions in GDPs calculations;
   3. Consolidation, and expansion of existing institutions dealing with women's issues; establishment of a mechanism to coordinate all these institutions;
   4. Development of gender-disaggregated indicators and strengthening of monitoring and evaluation mechanism to measure women's participation in development.
2. Elimination of Gender Inequality, including:
   1. Reformulation of laws discriminatory to women to incorporate gender equality;
   2. Affirmative action policies and programs to reduce current inequality in economic social and other areas;
   3. Strengthening of punitive, rehabilitation and other measures to protect women's human rights against all kinds of violence by coordinated efforts of government, nongovernmental, and local institutions;
   4. An institutional arrangement for education, training, and publicity on eliminating gender biases from policy to implementation levels.
3. Empowerment, which includes:
   1. Special legal provisions for mandatory representation of women in formulation of policies and programs at all levels - from local to national;
   2. To ensure women's rights in ownership of land, agricultural training, marketing, and other income-generating activities;
      
   3. Development of a health system based on the healthy life-cycle approach to a woman's life, to ensure wider access to facilities for safe motherhood, delivery, etc.;
   4. Expansion of programs such as female student scholarships, recruitment of female teachers, and special facilities in technical education;
   5. Increase women's participation in all technical, entrepreneurial, and management training, and their access to institutional credit, other resources, and assets for income generation so that they can benefit from employment in various fields;
   6. Introduce and encourage adoption of technological improvements in agriculture and other fields so as to reduce the drudgery of women's work and increase their productivity.

As a regular plan formulation of National Planning Commission (NPC), the Tenth Plan/Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper is being implemented from the fiscal year 2002/03. The Tenth Plan is the third one after the restoration of democracy. As a policy continuation of the Eighth and the Ninth Plan, this plan has envisaged to expedite poverty alleviation by giving priority to high economic growth, good governance and social justice. The Tenth Plan has identified women as focal point for development in order to enhance human development indicator by achieving sustainable economic growth and poverty alleviation and guaranteeing development to the general people.

Nepalese society will be developed on the basis of gender equality and empowerment by incorporating women participation in every sector of development. In this process, main target will be to establish inalienable right of women. Women have been left behind in the economic and social development of Nepal. Non-inclusion of women development policy and programme in the sectoral level as per concept of gender equality, operation of limited women targeted programmes, non-increase of women participation in public policy formulation as expected, non-reform of gender discriminated laws, non-strengthening of institutional development for women development constitute major challenges for women right and gender equality during the Tenth Plan.

Strategies of the Tenth Plan consist in a participatory development process together with establishing the effective role of women in the national development, mainstreaming the ethnicities in the development process, and clearly defining the role of government, local bodies, the private sector, non-governmental organization and the civil societies. Women empowerment and their mainstreaming have been identified as nucleus in the implementation of the strategy for poverty alleviation. In this respect, strategy has been focused towards giving strong emphasis on women's education, improvement in women's health, and enhancement of women's participation in decision-making level. It is believed that this will directly contribute to poverty alleviation and sustainable development by achieving the target of women empowerment, gender equality and mainstreaming population management, enhancing family health including living standard of family.

Under the Tenth Plan, some sectors will be given a special focus, such as the sector of human resources development and women's empowerment. In order to achieve economic growth, appropriate priorities have to be given to women's empowerment. As women are facing problems due to gender inequality, it has become necessary to involve them in the decision-making process through their capability enhancement and empowerment. Also, they need to be brought forward as a focal point for enhancing their economic and social prosperity and accelerating poverty alleviation through increasing their access to resources.
Concerning social security and welfare, major social targets under the Ninth and the Tenth Plans are for example: the reduction of maternal mortality rates, the enhancement of maternity services, improvement of using family planning contraceptives, the increasing of women literacy. Children development policy, based on gender equality, will be adopted to reduce the socioeconomic gap prevailing among children.