Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.
Residents of Jhirpu Phulpingkatt, a village nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about 110 km from Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, are on red alert.
“If I am thirsty and want a bottle of Coca-Cola I can get it, no matter where in the world I am. Why can’t I get contraceptives or sexual heathcare?” asked Carlos Jimmy Macazana Quispe, a youth representative from Peru currently in Kuala Lumpur for the third edition of the Women Deliver global conference on the "health and well-being of women and girls."
With a combined population of over 1.7 billion, which includes some of the world’s poorest but also a sizeable middle class with a growing spending capacity, South Asia is a policymaker’s nightmare.
From Zimbabwe to El Salvador, women in poor countries suffer the brunt of climate change, but also learn to recover from disasters, to adapt and even to find opportunities in the new weather conditions.
Currently classified as one of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Nepal has one of the highest malnutrition rates globally, with over 41 percent of children suffering from chronic under-nourishment, particularly in rural areas.
Sita Tamang’s husband went missing sometime in 2004, two years before Nepal’s civil war came to an end. A native of Dharan, a town about 600 kilometres southeast of Kathmandu, Tamang waited seven years after his disappearance before she tried to claim compensation offered by the government after a 2006 peace deal ended this country’s bloodshed.
Nepal now ranks 11
th on a list of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, yet it remains one of the least disaster-prepared nations globally.
The Nepali government is receiving significant national and international blowback for a draft ordinance that rights groups, including ones in the United States, say would allow for a widespread amnesty for some accused of human rights and other abuses perpetrated during Nepal's decade-long civil war.
When Arati Chaudhary’s husband left for India to find work as a migrant labourer, the job of managing farm and family fell on her slender shoulders.
Nepal’s squabbling political parties have squandered an opportunity to pass into law one of the most gender-friendly constitutions ever devised.
Nepal will implement five projects with 110 million dollars sanctioned by the controversial Climate Investment Funds (CIFs), ignoring protestors who say this least developed country merits grants rather than climate loans.
There are gasps from the audience as a series of shocking images flash across the screen: human hands eaten away by arsenic, the carcass of a cow so emaciated that it looks two-dimensional, a starved child with matchstick legs grasping at the udder of an animal for sustenance.
Nepal’s joint forest management system has taken such deep roots that the country’s prolonged political instability has had little effect on it.
Chungda Sherpa, a former herder from eastern Nepal, has a warning tale ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Durban.
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