Project Case Study
Social protection for conflict-affected families in Nepal
Helping Nepal's poorest people by improving service delivery in social welfare provision
Nepal suffered over a decade of civil war, which ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2006.
Over 15,000 people are estimated to have died in the conflict, many of whom were the main household breadwinner, and families suffer ongoing economic and social exclusion as a result. Social welfare provision to support affected households has been limited.
To tackle some of these problems, the Asian Development Bank in 2008 engaged us to design and deliver a programme of interventions to build government capacity to improve service delivery in social welfare provision.
The team developed a range of tools and techniques to enable the government to initiate social welfare programmes, many of them the first of their kind in Nepal. These included a postgraduate diploma course in social work, running train-the-trainer courses for district officials to promote the dissemination of knowledge of social welfare models, promoting the rights of children, and running civil society-implemented dissemination workshops in 31 villages. The team also designed a set of interventions to promote the economic empowerment of 4,000 vulnerable and conflict-affected families.
These included enhancing smallholder productivity and competitiveness to address food insecurity, promoting livestock-based activities, strengthening buyer-supplier linkages and improving market access.
These activities have provided people with the training and knowledge to promote social welfare programmes, meaning that the economic future of many conflict-affected families is not so bleak.
