In Nepal almost 22 million people are affected by indoor air pollution. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
PHARPING, Nepal, Apr 15 2015 (IPS)

When 26-year-old Laxmi married into the Archaya household in Chhaimale village, Pharping, south of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, she didn’t think she would be spending half the day in the kitchen inhaling smoke from the stove.

“The smoke made me cough so much I couldn’t breathe. It was difficult to cook,” the young woman tells IPS.

“[Open] fires and traditional cookstoves and fuels is one of the world's most pressing health and environmental problems.” -- Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
At the time, the family was using a rudimentary cookstove, the kind that has been found to be inefficient, unsafe and unhealthy. These stoves release hazardous pollutants such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter and nitrous oxide, cause burns and sometimes disfigurement and put million of people – particularly women – at risk of severe health problems.

The toxic gases are known to create respiratory problems, pneumonia, blindness, heart diseases, cancer and even low birth rates. Every year 4.3 million premature deaths worldwide are attributed to indoor air pollution.

In Nepal almost 22 million people are affected by it.

Six months ago, Laxmi and her father-in-law realised that the women in their neighbourhood, a village of about 4,000 people, were getting their housework done faster and had free time to do other things.

When Laxmi’s father-in-law went to investigate, he found that they were using improved cookstoves and the family immediately decided to upgrade.

“I wanted to install improved cookstoves before, but I didn’t have an idea of how to go about it, or what organisations I could approach to ask for help,” Damodar Acharya, Laxmi’s father-in-law, tells IPS.

Fortunately for the Acharya family, the U.S.-based organisation Global Peace Foundation (GPF) had been working in the village and helping communities build mud-brick clean stoves with locally available materials.

Unlike traditional stoves, clean cookstoves have airtight chambers that prevent smoke from escaping into cramped kitchens. They also have small chimneys through which poisonous exhausts can exit the house.

“The [organisation] took 500 rupees [about five dollars] from us, but they did everything, including mixing raw materials, building the stove and teaching us how to clean them every few weeks,” Damodar Acharya explains.

According to Khila Ghale, of GPF-Nepal, the five-dollar fee includes “the labour charges of the stove master to build the stove, the cost of bricks, three or four types of rods, and the materials that make up the chimney.”

The entire cost of a two-hole mud brick stove ranges between 12 and 15 dollars. There is no government subsidy on improved cookstoves, so organisations like GPF help financially whenever they can.

However, the amount is still too much for most families in Nepal, where more than 75 percent of the population earns less than 1.25 dollars per day.

Ghale, who works directly with communities in raising awareness about the benefits of improved cookstoves, says in order to make them sustainable, it is important to monitor their use, talk to the communities about the benefits and challenges and make them aware that the stoves have to be properly maintained.

“The stove is sustainable but it has to be cleaned [and] repaired properly for long term use. It is unreasonable to expect it to work forever, but if maintained properly, it can be sustainable,” he says.

“If we can make families aware of the benefits, especially about the health benefits for women and children, the stoves [could] become an essential part of the household.”

According to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, over 80 percent of Nepali people use solid fuels such as wood and cow dung for cooking. In this country of 28 million, over 75 percent of households cook indoors, and 90 percent cook on open fires.

In January 2013 the government of Nepal announced clean cooking solutions for all by 2017. This initiative is in line with the United Nation Foundation’s Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves project, which aims to adopt clean cooking solutions for 100 million households worldwide by 2020.

The Global Alliance claims, “[Open] fires and traditional cookstoves and fuels is one of the world’s most pressing health and environmental problems.”

Indeed, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has found that the three billion people worldwide who rely on solid fuels and indoor open fires for cooking suffer severe health impacts from the pollution. More men, women and children die each day as a result of exposure to indoor air pollution than die from malaria and tuberculosis.

A few weeks after the Acharya family built their clean cookstove, Laxmi’s neighbour Durga and her husband decided they also wanted one.

Durga Sharma tells IPS, “I have to cook early in the morning because I have two kids who go to school.” Using an improved cookstove has made her life easier, she says, and is keeping her family healthier.

Nepali women like Durga and Laxmi spend over five hours in the kitchen every day. Today, with improved cookstoves their cooking time is cut in half, and they have to use 50 percent less firewood.

In addition, they are much more environmentally-friendly than burning solid fuels.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) black carbon, which traditional cookstoves produce, is the second biggest climate pollutant after carbon dioxide.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Asia says accounts for 40 percent of black carbon, which is responsible for altering monsoon patterns, adversely impacting agriculture and damaging water supplies. Thus, experts say, implementing cleaner cooking solutions for millions of households worldwide will feed automatically into global goals to reduce carbon emissions.

Back in Chhaimale village, around midday, Laxmi and Durga have already finished their housework for the day, and have even had the time to run errands.

Both women want to use the extra time they have to do what they love: Durga hopes to sell sundried vegetables in the local market and Laxmi is thinking about joining evening classes to complete her Masters degree programme, options they would simply not have had before.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Every morning Raj Kumari Chaudhari offers prayers to this mango tree where she took shelter during the floods in 2014 in mid-west Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
BARDIYA, Nepal, Feb 26 2015 (IPS)

Every morning, Raj Kumari Chaudhari walks from her home to the other end of Padnaha village, located in the Bardiya district of mid-west Nepal, to a big mango tree to offer prayers.

The tree is majestic, its branches spreading as far as the eye can see. “This tree doesn’t bear fruit, but it saved my family from death,” she says. In her eyes, this single tree did more for her family at their time of need than the government of Nepal.

“We’re no strangers to rebuilding our lives […] but I hope my daughters won’t have to do it over and over again, like we did.” -- Raj Kumari Chaudhari, a survivor of the floods that swept away her village in mid-West Nepal in August, 2014
On the night of Aug. 14, 2014, Chaudhari lost her home when a big flood washed her entire village away. Her husband grabbed their eldest daughter, while she carried her twins on her shoulders, and ran.

When they reached the other side of the village, they realized there was no escape. They climbed the nearest tree and took shelter. In a matter of minutes 11 other people from her village had climbed the tree.

“My six-month old baby was the youngest amongst us, I tied him with my shawl so he wouldn’t fall,” says Kalpana Gurung, 27.

Bardiya, one of three districts in mid-west Nepal, was the hardest hit by last year’s flood; the District Disaster Relief Committee of Bardiya says more than 93,000 people were affected.

The gushing waters killed 32 and 13 still remain missing. Almost 5,000 people were affected in Padnaha village where the Chaudhari family lived.

The year 2014 was considered the deadliest on record in Nepal in terms of natural disasters. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs 492 people were killed and over 37,000 households affected by disasters between April 2014 and February 2015.

Still, experts say, the government hasn’t formulated a long-term response for those like the Chaudhari family who survived these catastrophic events.

Raj Kumari and Hira Lal Chaudhari, their 11-year-old daughter, and their eight-year-old twins survived the August 2014 flood in mid-west Nepal by climbing a mango tree and waiting for the waters to recede. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

It took the community of Padnaha five months to get their lives back together. Now 12 families have rebuilt their homes. “This entire village was like a desert after the floods,” Raj Kumari Chaudhari, one of the survivors, recalls. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

“The government has no direction, no plans for rehabilitating survivors – those who lost [their] lands essentially became stateless,” says Madhukar Upadhya, a watershed and landslide management expert.

After the 2008 flooding of the Koshi River in east Nepal the government established a disaster-training centre, the police force now has a disaster division and Nepal’s army has a disaster directorate. But the government’s focus is on rescue and relief, and not rehabilitation and resettlement, experts say.

Living on a knife’s edge in disaster-prone Nepal

Chaudhari’s family and the majority of her neighbours are from the Tharu community, indigenous to western Nepal. They are former ‘kamaiya’, meaning people affected by the oppressive system of bonded labour that was abolished by law only in 2002.

After being liberated, her family were evicted from their homes by their former masters and lived out in the open for years. Two years ago, the government finally resettled them in Padnaha.

“It took us a long time to build our homes, the kids were finally feeling settled, and then the floods washed away everything,” Chaudhari tells IPS.

After spending 24 hours on the tree branches, water swirling below, Chaudhari and her family were finally able to come down and rush to a school nearby. When the water level receded, they saw that everything had been washed away.

“We may have lost our homes and belongings, but unlike other survivors of floods and landslides, we still had our lands to come back to,” says 18-year old Sangita, another tree survivor.

With assistance in the form of raw materials from Save the Children, and Nepal’s 13-day Cash for Work programme that provided them 3.5 dollars a day for their labour, the community started to rebuild.

In a matter of a few days 12 households cleared away the debris and erected their huts.

Kalpana Gurung inspects her vegetable garden and hopes she will harvest enough green leafy vegetables for her family this spring. As a nursing mother, she is worried she won’t be able to provide enough nutrition to her nine-month-old baby. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

Eleven-year-old Saraswati Chaudhari and her twin sisters Puja and Laxmi are ready for school. Activists say the government must formulate a comprehensive disaster management plan to safeguard families living in disaster-prone areas. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

Eighteen-year-old Sangita remembers the night when she woke up to water surrounding her bed. Pointing at the tree where she took shelter she says, “That tree over there saved my life, but I want to forget about that horrible night.” Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

Today, Chaudhari has planted some vegetables in the garden, an additional source of nutrition for her family. She is worried that what happened last year may happen again and she realizes now that she has to be prepared.

Climate experts say that the little model community is not sustainable – changes in weather patterns mean that every monsoon is likely to bring floods and even landslides to vulnerable regions of Nepal.

A study released last year by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) found that climate variability and extreme weather events costs the government of Nepal the equivalent of between 1.5 and two percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) each year.

Twelve massive floods over the last four decades have cost every single affected household, on average, the equivalent of 9,000 dollars.

Considering that the country’s average income per family was about 2,700 dollars in 2011, this represents a major burden, borne primarily by the poor – like the Chaudhari family – who live in disaster-prone areas.

Every year since 1983, floods in Nepal have caused an average of 283 deaths, destroyed over 8,000 houses and left close to 30,000 affected families to deal with the fallout of the disaster.

As Chaudhari gazes off into the distance towards their sacred mango tree she says, “We’re no strangers to rebuilding our lives […] but I hope my daughters won’t have to do it over and over again, like we did.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

: Eighteen-year-old Sangita remembers the night when she woke up to water surrounding her bed. Pointing at the tree where she took shelter she says, “That tree over there saved my life, but I want to forget about that horrible night.” Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
BARDIYA, Nepal, Feb 26 2015 (IPS)

Every morning, Raj Kumari Chaudhari walks from her home to the other end of Padnaha village, located in the Bardiya district of mid-west Nepal, to a big mango tree to offer prayers.

The tree is majestic, its branches spreading as far as the eye can see. “This tree doesn’t bear fruit, but it saved my family from death,” she says. In her eyes, this single tree did more for her family at their time of need than the government of Nepal.

On the night of Aug. 14, 2014, Chaudhari lost her home when a big flood washed her entire village away. Her husband grabbed their eldest daughter, while she carried her twins on her shoulders, and ran.

When they reached the other side of the village, they realized there was no escape. They climbed the nearest tree and took shelter. In a matter of minutes 11 other people from her village had climbed the tree.

“My six-month old baby was the youngest amongst us, I tied him with my shawl so he wouldn’t fall,” says Kalpana Gurung, 27.

Bardiya, one of three districts in mid-west Nepal, was the hardest hit by last year’s flood; the District Disaster Relief Committee of Bardiya says more than 93,000 people were affected.

The gushing waters killed 32 and 13 still remain missing. Almost 5,000 people were affected in Padnaha village where the Chaudhari family lived.

The year 2014 was considered the deadliest on record in Nepal in terms of natural disasters. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs 492 people were killed and over 37,000 households affected by disasters between April 2014 and February 2015.

Still, experts say, the government hasn’t formulated a long-term response for those like the Chaudhari family who survived these catastrophic events.

With assistance in the form of raw materials from Save the Children, and Nepal’s 13-day Cash for Work programme that provided them 3.5 dollars a day for their labour, the community of 12 families rebuilt their huts in a matter of days.

Today, Chaudhari has planted some vegetables in the garden, an additional source of nutrition for her family. She is worried that what happened last year may happen again and she realizes now that she has to be prepared.

Climate experts say that the little model community is not sustainable – changes in weather patterns mean that every monsoon is likely to bring floods and even landslides to vulnerable regions of Nepal.

A study released last year by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) found that climate variability and extreme weather events cost the government of Nepal the equivalent of between 1.5 and two percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Twelve massive floods over the last four decades have cost every single affected household, on average, the equivalent of 9,000 dollars.

Considering that the country’s average income per family was about 2,700 dollars in 2011, this represents a major burden, borne primarily by the poor – like the Chaudhari family – who live in disaster-prone areas.

Every year since 1983, floods have caused an average of 283 deaths, destroyed over 8,000 houses and left close to 30,000 affected families to deal with the fallout of the disaster.

As Chaudhari gazes off into the distance towards their sacred mango tree she says, “We’re no strangers to rebuilding our lives […] but I hope my daughters won’t have to do it over and over again, like we did.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Kids work side by side at a temporary school for those displaced by floods in eastern Nepal. Many children experience trauma, fear or other psychological impacts of natural disasters, but few receive the necessary treatment. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
SURKHET, Nepal, Feb 13 2015 (IPS)

On the night of Aug. 14, 2014, 10-year-old Hari Karki woke up to his grandfather’s loud yelling in the family’s home in Paagma, a small village in east Nepal.

He was warning Hari’s family to move out of the house immediately because they were getting flooded. It had been raining non-stop for a couple of days. Hari could hear the water gushing. He grabbed his sister’s and grandfather’s hands, waded through knee-deep water in his living room, and ran as fast as he could.

“Advocating for mental health itself is such a big challenge in Nepal. We are not even close to getting specialised services such as mental health programmes that focus entirely on children." -- Shristee Lamichhane, mental health advisor with the United Mission to Nepal (UMN)
On the other side of the village, on much higher ground, is a primary school. They took shelter there for the night as heavy rains devastated the village, washed away Hari’s school and his neighbours, and inundated his house.

“Life changed forever for us that night,” says Hari’s father, Dhan Bahadur Karki. The floods and landslides that took place in Surkhet district in mid August last year affected more than 24,000 people, according to the District Disaster Relief Committee, a Nepal government-led coalition of international aid organisations and local NGOs.

The disaster displaced 12,000 people and killed 24; 90 still remain missing. More than 40 percent of those affected were children. For them, experts say, the horror of surviving such a disaster does not simply fade away; often, it lingers for a lifetime.

“Children lose their homes, school, friends and family members,” says Manoj Bist, a child protection officer with Save the Children, Nepal, which has been working in the flood affected areas of mid-west Nepal. “When their support system is lost, children become vulnerable to violence, disease and abuse.”

Five months since the disaster, those displaced by floods are still living in tents. Karki’s family has pitched their tent across the river from where their home used to be. “I see what used to be my house from my tent everyday, but I can’t get myself to go back there and try to rebuild,” says Dhan Bahadur Karki.

Along with their belongings, the flood washed away the little saving they had in the house. So money is tight for the Karki family and Dhan Bahadur is planning to leave for Malaysia to work in a mobile phone factory as soon as he gets a visa.

Even as Dhan Bahadur plans his departure, he is most worried about his two children and the state of their mental health.

Hari complains about not being able to concentrate at school. A good student before the floods, his grades have slipped. “I can’t fall asleep at night and when I do, I have nightmares,” says Hari as he comes out of his temporary classroom in a bamboo trailer. Last month, Hari could not be found on his bed at night. When his relatives went looking for him, they found him near the woods, sleepwalking.

“The kind of psychological stress a child goes through after a natural disaster is profound, and has to be dealt with early on in life so it doesn’t have a long-term consequence ” Saroj Prasad Ojha, associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) in Kathmandu, tells IPS.

In Nepal, there is a near-total absence of official data on the number of children in need of mental health care, from young victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence, to children affected by natural disasters, to kids suffering from conflict-related stress and trauma.

Still, health professionals and social activists here say it is a major issue that calls for swift government action.

Stigma scuppers progress on mental health

The World Health Organisation estimates that 450 million people worldwide have a mental disorder, and mental illnesses account for 13 percent of the global disease burden.

There are no official numbers for the 28 million in Nepal, but the Christian charity United Mission to Nepal (UMN) that works on mental health issues estimates that approximately 20-25 percent of all out-patients attending primary health care services show some kind mental or behavioral disorder often presented with multiple physical complaints.

“The problem lies in the fact that mental illness is not seen as a health issue,” says Sailu Rajbhandari, clinical psychologist with Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation (TPO)-Nepal.

Nepal spends less than two percent of its 334-million-dollar health budget on mental health services. The 50-bed, Kathmandu-based Mental Hospital is the only one in the country that exclusively provides mental health and psychiatric services. There are 70 psychiatrists in Nepal, one for every 380,000 people, and only one child psychiatrist.

Other mental health-care providers such as clinical psychologists, social workers and nurses are even more scarce.

“Advocating for mental health itself is such a big challenge in Nepal. We are not even close to getting specialised services such as mental health programmes that focus entirely on children,” says Shristee Lamichhane, mental health advisor with UMN.

Arun Raj Kunwar, Nepal’s only child psychiatrist, faces this challenge every day at work.

“Our society and health system cannot even grasp the concept that children can have mental health issues,” says Kunwar. He says children’s trauma may be disguised and could manifest in the form of physical ailments because children cannot clearly express grief or fear.

Kunwar says that children need extra attention and trained specialists to deal with mental trauma.

A crucial link in the developmental chain

Experts say that mental health should be prioritised along with the other developmental goals of the country.

“It is surprising that children’s mental health is often left out from our development plans, considering children are the future, the next productive generation of the country,” explains Ojha of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital.

Ojha says there’s a need to properly train professionals so that they know how to deal with various types of mental health issues. “Counseling children who have gone through the trauma of natural disasters is different from those who have gone through the trauma of war – we need specialised focus.”

Official data on the number of children affected by Nepal’s decade-long ‘People’s War’ that ended in 2006 is missing. However, a 2008 National Human Rights Commission report states the war orphaned over 8,000 children and displaced over 40,000 children.

Few, if any, of them are receiving necessary mental health services.

There is also an urgent need to prioritise mental health at the local level. Lamichane of UMN recommends stationing trained mental health professionals at the 30 public hospitals across Nepal.

“But mental health has to be integrated at the primary health care level because that is where patients first come with their problems,” says Lamichhane.

Nepal is a party to the United Nation’s global commitment to prevention and control of non-communicable diseases. In 2014, the country formulated the Multi Sectoral Action Plan for Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases 2014-2020, which positioned mental health as one of the country’s priority areas.

Psychiatrists and mental health professionals are hopeful that this move will encourage the government to pay attention.

“It may be slow, but mental health issues are getting a little more attention than they were a few years ago,” says Lamichhane “This is the time to make a case for children, really hammer the issue home so that the issue of children’s mental health is not forgotten,” adds Lamichhane.

In Paagma village, local psychosocial counselor Santoshi Singh has begun working with Hari and his sister. “Depending on what his case is like, there are a few things I can do to help Hari as a counselor,” says Singh, “But if the case is severe, I am really unsure where I can send him so he can get the kind of help that he needs.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Sadhana Ghimire, 23, makes sure to give her 18-month-old daughter nutritious food, such as porridge containing grains and pulses, in order to prevent stunting. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
RASUWA, Nepal, Jul 22 2014 (IPS)

Durga Ghimire had her first child at the age of 18 and the second at 21. As a young mother, Durga didn’t really understand the importance of taking care of her own health during pregnancy.

“I didn’t realise it would have an impact on my baby,” she says as she sits on the porch of her house in Laharepauwa, some 120 kilometers from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, nursing her third newborn child.

It is late in the afternoon and she is waiting expectantly for her two older daughters to return from school. One is nine and the other is six, but they look much smaller than their actual age.

“They are smaller in height and build and teachers at school say their learning process is also much slower,” Durga tells IPS. She is worried that the girls are stunted, and is trying to ensure her third child gets proper care.

A recent United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) report shows that Nepal is among 10 countries in the world with the highest stunting prevalence, and one of the top 20 countries with the highest number of stunted children.

“Reducing stunting among children increases their chances of reaching their full development potential, which in turn will have a long-term impact on families’, communities’ and the country’s ability to thrive.” -- Peter Oyloe, chief of USAID Nepal’s Suaahara (‘Good Nutrition’) project at Save the Children-Nepal
UNICEF explains stunting as chronic under-nutrition during critical periods of growth and development between the ages of 0-59 months. The consequences of stunting are irreversible and in Nepal the condition affects 41 percent of children under the age of five.

“Nepal’s ranking […] is worrying, not just globally but also in South Asia,” Giri Raj Subedi, senior public health officer at Nepal’s ministry of health and population, tells IPS.

A 2013 progress report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) done by Nepal’s National Planning Commission (NPC) says while the number of stunted children declined from 57 percent in 2001 to 41 percent in 2011, it is still high above the 30 percent target set by the U.N..

“Stunting is a specific measure of the height of a child compared to the age of the child, and it is indicative of how well the child is developing cognitively,” says Peter Oyloe, chief of party of USAID Nepal’s Suaahara, or ‘Good Nutrition’ project at Save the Children Nepal.

Oyloe adds, “Reducing stunting among children increases their chances of reaching their full development potential, which in turn will have a long-term impact on families’, communities’ and the country’s ability to thrive.”

Child health and nutrition experts argue that, while poverty is directly related to inadequate intake of food, it is not the sole indicator of malnutrition or increased stunting.

Saba Mebrahtu, chief of the nutrition section at UNICEF-Nepal, says the immediate causes include poor nutrient intake, particularly early in life. Fifty percent of stunting happens during pregnancy and the rest after infants are born.

“When we are talking about nutrient-rich food […] we are talking about ensuring that children get enough of it even before they are born,” says Mebrahtu. The time between conception and a child’s second birthday is a crucial period, she said, one of rapid growth and cognitive development.

Thus it is incumbent on expecting mothers to follow a careful diet before the baby is born.

Basic education could save lives

Sadhana Ghimire, 23, lives a few doors down from Durga. Separated by a few houses, their approaches to nutrition are worlds apart.

Ghimire breast-fed her 18-month-old daughter exclusively for six months. She continues to make sure that her own diet includes green leafy vegetables, meat or eggs, along with rice and other staples, as she is still nursing.

She gives credit to the female community health-worker in her village, who informed her about the importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life.

In preparation for her daughter’s feeding time, Ghimire mixes together a bowl of homemade leeto, a porridge containing one-part whole grains such as millet or wheat and two-parts pulses such as beans or soy.

“I was only using grains to make the leeto before I was taught to make it properly by the health workers and Suaahara,” she says.

However, making leeto was not the most important lesson Ghimire learned as an expecting mother. “I had no idea that simple things like washing my hands properly could have such a long term effect on my daughter’s health,” she says.

Even seemingly common infections like diarrhoea can, in the first two years, put a child at greater risk of stunting.

“That is because the nutrients children are using for development are used instead to fight against infection,” says Mebrahtu emphasising the need for simple practices such as proper hand washing and cleaning of utensils.

If children are suffering from infection due to poor hygiene and sanitation they can have up to six diarrhoeal episodes per year, she warns, adding that while “children recover from these infections, they don’t come back to what they were before.”

Fighting on all fronts

Food insecurity is one of the biggest contributing factors to stunting in Nepal. Rugged hills and mountains comprise 77 percent of the country’s total land area, where 52 percent of Nepal’s 27 million people live.

Food insecurity is worst in the central and far western regions of the country; the prevalance of stunting in these areas is also extreme, with rates above 60 percent in some locations.

Thus experts recognise the need to fight simultaneously on multiple fronts.

“Our work in nutrition has proven again and again that a single approach to stunting doesn’t work because the causes are so many – it really has to be tackled in a coordinated way,” says UNICEF’s Mebrahtu.

In 2009 the government conducted the Nutrition Assessment and Gap Analysis (NAGA), which recommended building a multi-sector nutrition architecture to address the gaps in health and nutrition programmes.

“The NAGA study stated clearly that nutrition was not the responsibility of one department, as was previously thought,” Radha Krishna Pradhan, programme director of health and nutrition at Nepal’s NPC, tells IPS.

Nepal is also one of the first countries to commit to the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, which recognises multiple causes of malnutrition and recommends that partners work across sectors to achieve nutritional goals.

Thus, in 2012, five ministries in Nepal came together with the NPC and development partners to form the Multi-Sector Nutrition Plan (MSNP).

Public health experts say MSNP is a living example of the SUN movement in action and offers interventions with the aim of reducing the current prevalence of malnutrition by one-third.

Interventions include biannual vitamin D and folic acid supplements for expectant mothers, deworming for children, prenatal care, and life skills for adolescent girls.

On the agricultural front, ministries aim to increase the availability of food at the community level through homestead food production, access to clean and cheap energy sources such a biogas and improved cooking stoves, and the education of men to share household loads.

MSNP’s long-term vision is to work towards significantly reducing malnutrition so it is no longer an impending factor towards development. The World Bank has estimated that malnutrition can cause productivity losses of as much as 10 percent of lifetime earnings among the affected, and cause a reduction of up to three percent of a country’s GDP.

At present the Plan is in its initial phase and has been implemented in six out of 75 districts in Nepal since 2013.

(END)

Farming in the monsoon season in Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS.

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

Water is a critical resource in Nepal’s economic development as agriculture, industry, household use and even power generation depends on it. The good news is that the Himalayan nation has plenty of water. The bad news – water abundance is seasonal, related to the monsoon months from June to September.

Nepal’s hydrologists, water experts, meteorologists and climate scientists all call for better management of water. But a vital element of water management – quality scientific data – is still missing.“If the information is lacking or if it is inaccurate, how is a poor farmer supposed to protect himself?” -- Shib Nandan Shah of the Ministry of Agricultural Development

Luna Bharati, who heads the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Kathmandu, tells IPS, “If we don’t know how much water there is, we cannot manage it or carry out good water resources assessment.”

Shib Nandan Shah of the Ministry of Agricultural Development agrees that accurate and timely data, especially rainfall data, is important to rural farming communities. Thirty-five percent of Nepal’s GDP and more than 74 percent of its 27 million people are dependent on agriculture. And most of Nepal’s agriculture is rain fed.

“Reliable data is especially important for a farmer who wants to insure his crops,” says Shah. “If the information is lacking or if it is inaccurate, how is a poor farmer supposed to protect himself?” Every year, floods and landslides cause 300 deaths in Nepal on average, and economic losses are estimated to exceed over 10 million dollars.

Data becomes important in a country like Nepal that has large, unutilised water resources. At the local level, development work becomes harder, and there’s a risk that development is being based on “guesstimates”.

“Simulations without data to verify against are meaningless,” Vladimir Smakhtin, theme leader at IWMI, tells IPS from Sri Lanka.

Experts also argue that water data cannot be studied in isolation. “Data on rainfall, water resources, weather are all interlinked with hydro power development, road building and also aviation,” says Rishi Ram Sharma, director of Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM).

One of the biggest challenges in Nepal, and the reason why collecting information is so difficult, is the country’s inaccessible terrain. About 86 percent of the land area is covered by hills, and steep, rugged mountains.

“Most of the high altitude data we have on water and climate change is not our own, it is based on global circulation models,” says Sanjay Dhungel at Nepal’s Water and Energy Commission Secretariat. “The more data we have the better, but in our context we don’t have much to compare with.”

Scientists believe it will take many years to establish better networks of measuring stations. Experts recommend the use of new technology such as remote sensing which can be used to measure evapo-transpiration, soil moisture and land use.

One of the most important reasons why scientists and Nepali policymakers need water and weather related statistics is to understand climate change.

“First of all we don’t have enough data, and what we do have is not analysed properly, which means a lot of climate change prediction relating to disappearing snow, glacial melt, water scarcity becomes misleading,” argues IWMI’s Bharati.

“If we find that glacial water is contributing to five percent of total water resources, then may be the effect is not as drastic as we have been made to believe,” says Bharati. “But we don’t know any of that because we don’t have reliable data.”

In one recent measure to address this problem, Nepal’s DHM introduced the climate data portal in 2012 where data relating to weather, water and geography is stored. Real-time information regarding flooding, water levels, precipitation is available through DHM’s website.

IWMI is also working on a portal to bring together data, including basic information on land use, census and migration, in order to aid researchers.

Anil Pokhrel, Kathmandu-based disaster risk management specialist with the World Bank agrees that making data public is a big and important step. This means that whoever is looking for information has access to it and can download it.

Pokhrel says data on water, climate change, weather and agriculture is so interlinked that it really needs to be open.

“We talk about ‘geo nodes’ – if DHM works on weather, water and climate change related data, the roads department can work on road data and mapping, another department can work on agriculture, but they have the ability to feed off each other,” says Pokhrel. “It is about creating synergies.”

For this he recommends that the portal be open source. “At the end of the day, there’s no other option – we have to make portals to consolidate data and make it accessible and user-friendly,” says Pokhrel.

Arjun Kumar Sah is engaged in a long struggle for citizenship. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS.

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Mar 10 2014 (IPS)

Around 4.3 million of Nepal’s 27 million population lack citizenship documents, rendering them stateless, says a report by the Forum for Women, Law and Development (FWLD), which works to promote and protect the interests of Nepali women.

Today in Nepal one cannot register birth, file for a change of address, buy or sell land, acquire a passport, open bank accounts, sit for higher-level examination, register to vote or even get a mobile phone card without citizenship documents."Our constitution and law are essentially saying a Nepali man can marry anyone and his child will be Nepali but if a woman marries a foreigner, her child will have problems getting citizenship."

“Citizenship identification is the fundamental piece of document which connects an individual to the state. Without it a person has no proof of existence,” says lawyer Sabin Shrestha of FWLD.

In 2006, Nepal had passed the Citizenship Act, which guaranteed Nepali citizenship to children born to a Nepali mother or a Nepali father. Nepal’s 2007 interim Constitution and a 2011 Supreme Court directive backed the Act.

But in 2012, things became tougher. The Constituent Assembly members drafted a new provision, which stated that Nepali citizenship would be granted only to those who could prove that their mother and father both were Nepali citizens.

Getting citizenship through the mother, however, is particularly difficult.

“Difficulty in getting citizenship through the mother is not the only reason why millions of Nepalis are stateless. But acquiring citizenship through the mother is still extremely difficult,” Shrestha told IPS.

Nepal went from requiring citizenship of just the father before the 2006 citizenship law was passed, to that of either mother or father, and to meeting widely enforced requirements now for both mother and father. However, this requirement has not been fully written or passed.

Besides, the, 2006 citizenship law provisions often get lost when they reach the Chief District Officer (CDO) level. The CDO can in effect grant citizenship to whoever he pleases.

Arjun Kumar Sah, 24, was born in Nepal to a Nepali mother and Indian father and has lived in the country all his life. When Sah turned 16, he applied for citizenship but was told that he couldn’t because his father is not Nepali. After the Citizenship Act was passed in 2006, Sah went back to apply through his mother’s name but was denied again.

Early last year Sah filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court against the Home Ministry, the District Administration Office and the Office of the Prime Minister demanding citizenship through his mother. “The Supreme Court sent a letter asking the three why I have not been granted citizenship even though my mother is Nepali, but it has been nine months and I am yet to receive a reply,” Sah tells IPS.

If a Nepali man marries a foreign woman, their children get citizenship based on descent. However, when a Nepali woman marries a foreigner, their children can only get naturalised citizenship. That is, when a Nepali woman marries a foreign man, their child is not given citizenship by descent. The same rules don’t apply when a Nepali man marries a foreign woman – so getting Nepali citizenship still depends very much on what nationality the father is.

“Nepal’s Constitution and law have made getting citizenship through the mother a conditional right, attaching citizenship to a Nepali father and making the role of women useless,” lawyer Sushama Gautam tells IPS.

Advocate Dipendra Jha, who is fighting Sah’s case, says the new provision is regressive, and against the spirit of democracy and the idea that all citizens are equal.

“If we look at it from the gender angle, you see a huge disparity – our constitution and law are essentially saying a Nepali man can marry anyone and his child will be Nepali but if a woman marries a foreigner, her child will have problems getting citizenship. What kind of equality is that?”

Deepti Gurung has two daughters. She wants to register their birth so they can become citizens, but every time she is at the local ward office or at the CDO office, they ask her to identify the father.

“I raised my daughters by myself, I cared for their needs, I worry about their future, and the father abandoned them when they were young. So why is the government trying to bring him back in the picture?” Gurung asks. She says that not providing citizenship through mother is the biggest form of violence against women.

Gurung argues that a lot is left to the discretion of the CDO. When a Nepali citizen comes of age, the village committee recommends him or her to the district administration office, and the CDO eventually authorises and grants citizenship. “A lot depends on how sensitive the CDO is to that particular case,” says Gurung.

Activists say there may be more people being denied citizenship in little pockets, especially in southern Nepal because of the open border and cross marriages between India and Nepal, but citizenship is a national problem.

“It is especially prevalent among economically disenfranchised families,” says Jha. “Sah’s father never applied for citizenship because he ran a small business and didn’t really need government services but his children are living in a different world where citizenship documents are needed to access all kinds of services.”

Sah is studying for a Masters in Business Administration in Kathmandu. “I am graduating soon, how will I find a job without citizenship papers?” Sah asks.

The number of stateless people is growing every year. “This problem is multiplying because stateless people are giving birth to children who simply cannot apply for citizenship,” says FWLD’s Shrestha.

Discussions in Nepal around citizenship often get linked to issues of sovereignty and national security, especially in relation to Nepal’s open border with India.

But, asks Jha, “Should we be worrying about another country taking over Nepal when we have 4.3 million stateless people inside our own country that we don’t know what to do with?”

Srijana Chettri of the Asia Foundation, Nepal, argues, “You have to think about the risks and vulnerabilities that a stateless person faces – whether it is trafficking, exploitation, abuse or fraudulent migration.”

After months of political uncertainty, Nepal elected a new Constituent Assembly in November 2013 to write the Constitution. Activists say this is the right time to lobby for change in the rigid regulations regarding citizenship.

Protests over discrimination against Dalits in Nepal are delivering little. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS.

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Feb 3 2014 (IPS)

Maya Sarki, a resident of Belbari in eastern Nepal, was returning home one summer evening last year when she was attacked. She was forced down on the ground and her attacker attempted to rape her.

She screamed. Locals came to her rescue and the attempt was thwarted. Sarki recognised the voice of her attacker as that of a neighbour and filed a police complaint.

The next day Sarki was met by a mob, led by her alleged attacker, at the village market. She was called derogatory names, her clothes were torn, and soot was smeared on her face. She was garlanded with shoes, beaten, and paraded around town. After the incident, Sarki fled the village.

In Dailekh in western Nepal, Sushila Nepali, 28, was raped by a local schoolteacher for years. She was forced to abort twice, but got pregnant again and gave birth to two children. Disowned by her family, Nepali has been living on the streets and begging for shelter and food.“Dalit women are at the bottom of the caste and gender hierarchy in Nepal."

Sarki and Nepali are from different parts of the Himalayan nation, but what is common between them is their caste group – both belong to the socially marginalised Dalit community. Sarki’s attacker and Nepali’s rapist were both high caste Hindus.

There are an estimated 22 Dalit communities in Nepal. Researchers and Dalit organisations say they make up 20 percent of the country’s 27 million population. Dalits are considered to be at the bottom of Nepal’s 100 caste and ethnic groups.

They bear a much bigger burden of poverty, with 42 percent Dalits under the poverty line as opposed to 23 percent non-Dalits.

After a long political impasse, Nepal went back to polls in November. After two long months of negotiations, new assembly members are now finally sitting down and writing a new constitution. But experts say even in the new assembly, the Dalit community is the most under-represented, with only seven percent, or 38, of the 575 Constituent Assembly members being Dalit.

Rajesh Chandra Marasini, programme manager at the Jagaran Media Centre, an alliance of Dalit journalists formed to fight caste-based discrimination, worries that Dalit related issues would, once again, not get priority in the new constitution.

“I am concerned that the new Dalit assembly members would take the party line and become a mere physical presence,” he told IPS. “I fear that Dalit advocacy would become an afterthought.”

Nepal’s Civil Code 1854 had legalised the caste system and declared the Dalit community as ‘untouchable’. In a Hindu hierarchical structure, such a label dictates where Dalits can live, where they can study and where they can socialise.

In 1963, caste-based discrimination was abolished in Nepal and the National Dalit Commission was formed. In 2011, the Caste Based Discrimination and Untouchability Act was passed.

Yet, Dalits continue to be marginalised.

“Violence against the Dalit community is ignored or often goes unreported and unnoticed in Nepal,” said Padam Sundas, chair of Samata Foundation Nepal, a research and advocacy organisation that works for the rights of the marginalised community in Nepal.

Dalits are still barred from community activities such as worshipping in same temples as higher caste Nepalis. The higher castes don’t eat the food touched by members of the Dalit community or even use the same community tap that Dalits use for water. And women are the worst affected.

“Dalit women are at the bottom of the caste and gender hierarchy in Nepal,” said Bhakta Bishwokarma, president of the Nepal National Dalit Social Welfare Organisation (NNDSWO), which works to eliminate caste-based discrimination in Nepal.

“Dalit women’s suffering is triple-fold – society discriminates against them because they are women, then they are discriminated against because they belong to the Dalit community, and within their own community they suffer all over again for being women,” Bishwokarma told IPS.

Women’s rights activists say Dalit women are the most vulnerable.

“If you study the cases of women who are accused of being ‘witches’, they are usually Dalit women. They are the ones to be trafficked easily, they are the ones who work in terrible conditions,” said Durga Sob of the Feminist Dalit Organisation (FEDO) that works closely with the government on Dalit gender issues.

Activists say when Dalit victims of violence want to file a police complaint, they are discouraged.

“They are told that getting the law enforcement authorities involved would disturb social harmony, and victims are encouraged to informally reconcile,” said Bishwokarma. “No one is held accountable for any discriminatory acts against Dalits.”

News of the attack on Sarki received wide media coverage, and the attack and was severely condemned. A few days after the story broke activists gathered in front of the offices of Nepal’s policymakers and organised a protest. It saw a handful of women’s rights activists and allies standing with banners, demanding that the government act.

“The activists stood there for a few days, handed a memorandum to the government and the issue died down,” said Bindu Thapa Pariyar of the Association for Dalit Women’s Advancement of Nepal (ADWAN).

Researchers say there are major reasons why Dalit issues don’t get noticed.

“We have all kinds of acts and laws in place, but they are never implemented and even when we have tried to implement them, victims don’t get justice,” said Sob of FEDO.

She recommends that the legislation be made simple and local law enforcement authorities be trained, so they understand the rights of Dalit people.

Some activists say the Dalit movement has lost its momentum.

“We cannot think of Dalit activism with a ‘donor supported project implementation’ approach,” said Pariyar of ADWAN. “When the project money runs out, we move on but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have achieved what we set out to do.”

In Sarki’s case, for instance, there were issues of her rehabilitation, psychological trauma counselling, the safety of her family and her safe return home.

“Rights activists need to think long-term, a protest only nudges policymakers, real work happens with the victims in the field,” said Pariyar.

She calls for a stronger leadership in Dalit advocacy.

“The Dalit lawmakers may be under pressure from their parties, but we need watchdogs outside the assembly so that we can keep pushing them to make the right decision,” said Pariyar.

“If we don’t push now, when a new constitution for the nation is being written, we will never do it,” she said.

There are an estimated 165,000 domestic child labourers in Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Jul 25 2013 (IPS)

Last December, Pradeep Dongol, child protection officer at the Kathmandu-based Children and Women in Social Service and Human Rights (CWISH), received an urgent call from one of the NGO’s many offices in Nepal’s sprawling capital city.

Dongol rushed over to find an 11-year-old girl in the care of a CWISH staff member: her eyes were sunken, her hands covered in wounds, and she had lost patches of hair from her head.

He later learned that she had escaped from the house where she was working because she could no longer “bear…all the abuse.”

Reema (not her real name) was studying in grade three in a village about 400 km away from the capital when her parents decided to send her to Kathmandu with perfect strangers.

The family, a young couple, promised Reema’s parents that the girl would live with them, go to a good school and be an “older sister” to their young son.

However, Reema’s life in Kathmandu turned out to be very different. The couple never enrolled her in school; she ate nothing but leftovers, took care of the couple’s son, did all the housework and was never paid.

She had very little contact with her folks back home, was regularly beaten, and often pulled by her hair.

One day, on her way to drop the little boy off at his school, she met some of the local CWISH workers who teach at a school nearby. When she went home and expressed interest in going to that school, she was beaten.

The next day she ran away, and found her way to the CWISH office where she asked for protection.

Of the 7.7 million children between the ages of five and 17 in Nepal, an estimated 3.14 million are working. Two-thirds of these children are below the age of 14.

A recent rapid assessment conducted by Plan International, one of the oldest children’s development organisations in the world, and World Education estimates that over 165,000 working children are domestic labourers.

“Their plight…does not get importance because it happens within the four walls of someone’s home and not out in the open,” Bishnu Timilsina, a team leader for CWISH in Nepal, told IPS.

Such offers are hard to resist: though Nepal has made progress in poverty reduction, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2013 placed it at 157^th out of 187 countries listed.

According to the National Living Standard Survey 2010-2011 more than 30 percent of Nepalis live on less than 14 dollars per month.

About 80 percent of Nepalis, like Reema’s family, live in rural areas and depend on subsistence farming. Young children are expected to help their parents with farming and household chores.

Roughly half the children under five years of age in Nepal’s remote rural belt are malnourished, while their communities lack basic services like primary healthcare, education and safe drinking water.

The custom of plucking children from their villages gained traction with the rapid industrialisation of the 1990s, when the growth of the middle class coupled with internal migration during the People’s War years (1996-2006) fuelled demand for cheap labour.

Children quickly filled the gap left by women abandoning their traditional roles as homemakers in search of paid work, and took on all the domestic duties from cooking, scrubbing and washing clothes to caring for infants and the infirm.

Now, according to Plan International and World Education’s rapid assessment, there are as many child domestic workers in urban centres (62,579) as in rural areas (61,471).

Child rights activists say one of the biggest challenges is the widespread social perception that child labour is not necessarily a bad thing.

“There’s an understanding that children have to work so that they learn the ‘value’ of labour,” Nita Gurung, programme manager of the state-run Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB), told IPS.

As a result, enforcing laws that prohibit child domestic labour is not easy.

People see young children labouring in the homes of their “neighbours, relatives and friends” and accept this as a normal part of life, says Danee Luhar, a child protection officer with the Nepal country office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“There is a need to break through that perception so that society renders domestic child labour unacceptable,” he told IPS.

Nepal has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour and ILO Convention 138 on minimum age for admission to employment.

These international accords were translated into national laws via Nepal’s 2007 Interim Constitution and are enshrined in the 1992 Children’s Act, the 2000 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, and the 2002 Bonded Labour Prohibition Act.

However, the creation of national and international legislation without an accompanying increase in the capacity to enforce them has led to confusion about which government agency is implementing which laws in cases of domestic child labour.

At present, 10 labour inspectors are charged with overseeing the entire country and its population of 30.49 million people.

These inspectors only cover formal sectors like mining, tourism and cigarette and carpet manufacturing; it is still unclear who is responsible for the rescue and rehabilitation of child labourers in informal settings, like private homes.

“It is extremely problematic because in cases of abuse and exploitation there’s first a confusion about who is in charge, and what law or act to interpret,” says UNICEF’s Luhar.

When Reema escaped her employers, for instance, she was taken to a safe house and a case was filed on her behalf at the government’s labour office.

Later, at the insistence of authorities, the perpetrators paid Reema cash compensation in the amount of 210 dollars, and signed a legal document agreeing to release her.

Reema is now safely back in her village but has yet to see the money, and her case at the labour office is pending.

“On paper there are regulations to make the perpetrators accountable but that is rarely done, and protection of victims is still not a priority,” child advocate Kamal Guragain told IPS.

Teen mothers give birth to 81 out of every 1,000 children in Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
CHAMPI, Nepal, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

Radhika Thapa was just 16 years old when she married a 21-year-old boy three years ago. Now, she is expecting a baby and is well into the last months of her pregnancy. This is not the first time she has been with child – her first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages.

“The first time I conceived I was just 16, I didn’t know much about having babies, nobody told me what to do,” Thapa tells IPS in between assisting customers at the vegetable store she runs with her husband in the small town of Champi, some 12 km from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

"When girls get pregnant their education stops, which means a lack of employment opportunities and poverty." -- Bhogedra Raj Dotel
“The second time I wasn’t ready either, but my husband wanted a baby so I gave in,” she admitted.

After the second miscarriage, Thapa’s doctors urged her to wait a few years before trying again, but she was under immense pressure from her in-laws, who threatened to “find another woman for her husband if she kept losing her babies”.

What might seem like a horror story to some has become an accepted state of affairs in Nepal, the country with the highest child marriage rate in the world.

On average, two out of five girls are married before their 18^th birthday. The legal age for marriage in Nepal is 18 years with parental consent, and 20 without, a law that is seldom observed, least of all in rural parts of the country.

Studies show that child marriages occur most frequently among the least educated, poorest girls living out in the countryside.

According to the 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), 17 percent of married adolescent girls between 15 and 19 years are either pregnant or are mothers already. In fact, research shows that adolescent mothers give birth to 81 out of every 1,000 children in Nepal.

The survey also shows that 86 percent of married adolescents do not use any form of contraception, meaning that few girls are able to space their births.

Disturbed by trends in countries like Nepal, the UNFPA spotlighted teen pregnancy as the theme for this year’s World Population Day, observed annually on Jul. 11.

“Globally there are 16 million girls aged 15-19 who give birth each year – they never had the opportunity to plan their pregnancy. It is a developmental issue that goes beyond health,” Vallese stressed.

In reality, teen pregnancy can be a matter of life and death. Adolescent girls under the age of 15 are up to five times more likely to die during childbirth than women in their 20s.

The number one cause of death among girls aged 15-19 relates to complications in childbirth. Young mothers are at a high risk of suffering from complications such as obstetric fistula and uterine prolapse.

Furthermore, “the first child born to a mother aged 12-20 is at greater risk of being stunted or underweight, suffering from anaemia or even of dying before the age of five,” says Vallese.

Less visible, but equally troubling, is the host of social complications that teen mothers must navigate.

“When girls get pregnant their education stops, which means a lack of employment opportunities and poverty,” says Bhogedra Raj Dotel of the government’s family planning and adolescent sexual reproductive health division.

According to the UNFPA, 37 percent of married adolescent girls are not working and 76 percent of those who are employed are not paid in cash or kind for the work they do.

Menuka Bista, 35, is a local female community health volunteer in Champi, assisting about 55 households in her area. Bista has been advising Thapa, to ensure that the girl has a safe pregnancy.

“Radhika (Thapa) is educated, she knows she needs to go to the doctor and eat nutritious food for her baby to be safe, but she doesn’t make decisions about her body: her husband and in-laws do,” Bista told IPS.

This observation finds echo in research carried out by various experts: according to Dotel, husbands and in-laws make all the major decisions about a woman’s reproductive health, from what hospital she visits to where she will deliver her child.

For this reason, Vallese believes it is important to train husbands and family members on reproductive health and rights.

Another problem, experts say, is that almost all national policies have been designed with the assumption that adolescent pregnancies affect only married women, with little acknowledgement of the fact that unmarried teenaged girls also engage in sexual activities, said Vallese.

The penetration of the Internet and mobile phones into every aspect of daily life, coupled with a massive wave of migration of young rural men into urban areas, has created “a significant teenage population that engages in pre-martial sex,” she stressed.

Whether the teenaged girls are married or unmarried, sex education plays a major role in decreasing the number of pregnancies.

Sex education is a part of the national school curriculum from Grade 6 upwards, but teachers are not trained, and are uncomfortable talking about it. When the subject comes up in a classroom, most teachers simply skip that chapter, or defer to a health worker to explain the process of reproduction.

“There’s a general (perception) that teaching about sexual health makes girls promiscuous, but we have found it to be exactly the opposite,” says Shova KC, chair of a local cooperative that works with women in Champi.

Public health experts, meanwhile, have criticised the government for not implementing existing policies that could spare thousands of young girls from the trauma of complicated pregnancies so early on in life.

For instance, “more than 500 youth friendly service centers have been set up but progress is about more than just ticking boxes,” UNFPA Assistant Representative Latika Maskey Pradhan, told IPS.

In the future, she said, advocates must keep a close eye not only on how policies are designed but also on how they are implemented.

Children in Nepal's public primary schools are lagging behind their peers who attend private institutions. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

Sabitri Kumari Das, a middle-aged mother of two, is rightfully worried about her two young daughters: both girls attend a public primary school in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and neither one of them seems to be advancing academically.

Das fears they stand no chance competing against their peers who attend the costly private schools that dot this city of 30 million people. Unfortunately, she is probably right.

“Quality education means going beyond textbooks, encouraging students to be curious, analytical, to ask questions and draw their own conclusions." -- Bidhyanath Koirala, professor at Nepal’s Tribhuwan University
Eight-year-old Sumi is only just beginning to recognise numbers, whilst her contemporaries in private schools are already doing simple addition and subtraction. Her sister, six-year-old Nandini, spends all day at school playing with friends and has not yet even learned the alphabet.

The results of this year’s School Leaving Certificate (SLC), a final secondary level national examination, often referred to as the ‘iron gate’ since it determines which students will be eligible for higher secondary programmes, illustrate the bleak reality of Nepal’s public education system: only 34 percent of a total of 548,000 students who sat for the test passed, representing an eight-year low.

“Most kids who fail the SLC exams are from government schools, and I understand why,” Das told IPS, referring to the lack of facilities and dearth of trained teachers that plague government schools.

Numerous public holidays and politically-motivated closures mean that her “kids spend more time at home than they do at school. How will they study?” she asked.

Ironically, statistics indicate that Nepal’s education sector has made significant progress over the last few years, with more than 90 percent of school-aged children now enrolled in primary institutions.

A strong emphasis on girls’ education, in keeping with the MDG target of achieving universal primary education by 2015, has resulted in a rise in female enrollment, from 1.8 million students in 2003 to 2.4 million in 2011.

Nepal’s official education budget has more than doubled in the last five years, from 283 million in 2006-2007 to 670 million in 2012-2013.

But expert say these indicators only measure a quantitative change; there is very little discussion on the quality of education, especially in public schools.

Government studies show that eight percent of students in Grade 1 drop out, while 23 percent repeat the grade. Only 70 percent of the original class completes the primary level and less than a third reach Grade 10.

Shisir Khanal of Teach for Nepal, an organisation working towards ending education inequality, says that accessible and quality education should go hand in hand; but little attention has been paid to these twin issues

Questions surrounding high dropout rates – whether related to domestic violence, negative classroom environments or poverty – should have been examined back in the 1990s, which saw a boom in the number of private institutions that charged fees, Khanal told IPS.

This wave of privatisation, which emerged in response to demand for better schools by a rising middle class, effectively turned education into a commercial venture.

With all attention on private institutions, government schools were ignored and soon began to display the telltale signs of neglect: unqualified teachers, inadequate learning materials, and an exodus of disgruntled, barely literate students.

The 2006 April Uprising in Nepal paved the way for a major shift in public education, with protestors demanding that politicians, high-level bureaucrats and lawmakers send their children to government schools like everyone else.

This fuelled a renewed interest, and fresh investments, in the public education system.

Now, of the 7.8 million students in Nepal, 3.3 million attend public schools and the rest attend the roughly 25,000 private institutions spread out around the country.

According to education expert Bhola Dahal, the government and civil society have made concerted efforts to revive the moribund sector, focusing on teacher training, infrastructure development and community organising.

In 2004 the government launched an 814-million-dollar Education for All (EFA) initiative, which was expected to spark sweeping reforms.

A 2009 evaluation of the programme lauded progress in enrollment, access and parity, but the overall quality of the system was judged to be “extremely disappointing”, with a near total absence of mechanisms to monitor classroom environments and students’ achievements.

The EFA evaluation then paved the way for a six-year School Sector Reform Programme (SSRP), a four-billion-dollar national initiative that sought to improve early childhood development and make schooling more relevant to the needs of early school leavers via vocational and technical schemes involving handicrafts and computer skills.

The SSRP aimed to improve internal efficiency by offering teacher training programmes, and introducing monitoring mechanisms; but a February 2012 mid-term review conducted by an independent body found lingering issues, like inadequate attention to curriculum design, under-staffed classrooms and poor evaluation methodologies.

One of the problems is that “Nepali society misunderstands ‘quality education’ as fluency in the English language,” Bidhyanath Koirala, a professor at Nepal’s Tribhuwan University, told IPS.

“Quality education means going beyond textbooks, encouraging students to be curious, analytical, to ask questions and draw their own conclusions.”

Hari Lamsal, under-secretary for Nepal’s ministry of education, says the provision of quality education has been written into government policies for more than 50 years but somewhere along the road its meaning became distorted, with quality being equated with test results, or the number of children passing the SLC.

While some experts blame the problems on a lack of funding, people like Dahal believe the crisis stems from poor allocation of limited resources.

“Of the total SSRP funding (over four million dollars), more than 75 percent goes to pay teachers’ salaries, then textbooks, scholarships, infrastructure (and salaries) of government bureaucrats.

“Less than five percent of that funding goes to quality,” Dahal lamented.

To rectify this problem, Pramod Bhatta, education researcher at the Kathmandu-based Martin Chautari research institution, recommends schools make short-term investments in facilities like better libraries, science and computer labs, playgrounds, sports facilities and after-school activities.

However, until this happens, families with limited incomes face tough choices when it comes to their children’s education.

Das has now taken an extra job so she can send her two daughters to private school, but her combined income only adds up to 50 dollars a month, the same price as a month’s school fees in a private institution.

She is now considering moving out of her two-bedroom rented apartment to a smaller space in order to save more money.

“They say more than 72 percent who (sat for) this year’s SLC from government schools failed and almost 90 percent of those who sat from private schools passed. You tell me, as a mother what other choice do I have?”

(END)

Bhagwati Adhikari was a teenager when she was married off to a village boy of the same caste. Just a few years later when she was in her early 20s, she became a widow. Her husband, who worked as a security guard in Kathmandu, was murdered. Adhikari was left alone to support her family.

When Bhagwati got married, she was just starting eighth grade but had to quit school when she moved to her husband’s family. Her in-laws would not let her study. When her husband passed away, she had to find a way to support herself, so Adhikari looked for jobs but soon realised she had no skills.

She also understood that with her husband’s death the way society viewed her had also changed. Hindu customs in Nepal forbids widows from wearing shades of red. “I had to wear only white and it was pretty obvious that I was recently widowed,” recalls Adhikari.

“Neighbours and friends stopped talking to me, men made indecent advances, I wasn’t allowed to be around during religious ceremonies because widows are considered bad luck – it is not easy to be a widow in Nepal,” she says.

She knew she had to fight the battles alone and she couldn’t do that without education. She ignored her parents and in-laws’ objections, and went back to school in her native Kahbre district, west of Kathmandu valley. Adhikari flourished in high-school and as soon as she finished she found a job with Women for Human Rights, an organisation that works with widows to empower and fight for their rights.

Widows like Adhikari are humiliated; organisations who have been working with single women are shocked and women rights activists are outraged.

“We have worked so hard to end discrimination against widows, and have had small successes,” says Lily Thapa, founder and president of WHR, “but when the government makes a decision like this, it takes us many steps back and proves how insensitive policymakers can be.”

For many years WHR has been pushing the government to provide pension to all Nepali widows.

Rekha Subedi, 31, was widowed when her husband was killed during the ‘People’s War’ by the Maoists. Subedi is outraged, “Now I feel like there’s a price attached to me, how can the government think this step will empower widows like us?” she asks.

Representatives of rights groups say that this latest decision puts pressure on widows to marry. “Marriage is a deeply personal decision, it is a choice an individual makes. Why is the government interfering by allocating money for remarriage?” asks Thapa. Activists lobbying for the elimination of the dowry system fear that attaching monetary value to marriage may propagate a different kind of dowry system.

“Policymakers seem to think that the women can only feel secure if she is married to a man – this is downright humiliating for us widows who have been living alone and supporting our families,” says Nisha Swar whose husband was abducted and later killed by the Maoists in 2002.

Advocate Kabita Pandey of the human rights group Pro Public says that the government’s decision will create dependency of widows on men and will make them more vulnerable to violence. According to WHR, the number of widows with children is far more than those without. A decision like this not only makes the women but also their children vulnerable to abuse and sexual violence.

“This is a country where fathers, brothers and close family members sell their sister, daughter, wife, to traffickers because of poverty – we have had cases of women being trafficked for less than 100 dollars. Traffickers can easily marry widows, collect their 666 dollars and sell the women off for more money,” says Pandey.

The government has no figures on the number of widows in the country. WHR has 44,000 members in 225 villages of Nepal – its work area. But there is no data on how many widows there are in the remaining 3,688 villages.

WHR, which has filed a writ against the government, prime minister, minister and ministry of finance in October, is now in consultation with Nepal’s planning commission, ministry of finance and other ministries and activists say that the meetings so far have been positive.

“We are working so that the provisions are removed from the budget altogether, that’s what the widows want,” says Thapa. Women’s rights activist say that if the government tries to push through with the decision they will intensify their pressure and protest from the streets.

“This issue is not going to go by pushing it under the rug, we are united, and we’ll fight until this humiliating policy goes away,” says Swar.