Management Response

: Nepal
: 2019 - 2019 , Nepal (CO)
: Thematic evaluation of Women’s Economic Empowerment (AWEE and FWW) programme
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: Nepal
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UN Women Nepal Country Office (NCO) welcomes the overall findings of the Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) Programme Thematic Evaluation. The evaluation report highlights that the WEE Programme of UN Women is relevant in Nepal for overall gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE), and to the current political and social context of Nepal. Although the progress on the normative work has been slower than expected, the work in terms of sensitizing citizens on normative frameworks has gained momentum. Operationally, the programme has shown progress in achieving the outputs. The evaluation noted that the biggest undisputable impact commented by women and men and various key actors is the change in women’s attitude and self-confidence, ability to claim their rights, gain access to information and contribute to public life through their engagement in the WEE Programme. The findings and recommendations of the evaluation have been taken into consideration during the implementation of UN Women Nepal’s Strategic Note for the period 2018-2022. The recommendation will inform the finalization of NCO’s strategy for the WEE Programme (WEE Strategy) and UN Women programmes in Nepal.

: Approved
Recommendation: Embed the programme within the local structures by working more explicitly with municipalities by (a) involving municipalities in local needs assessments, the choice of activities, the target of beneficiaries and the monitoring; align WEE interventions to GESI municipal plans and budgets; and (b) find entry points such as existing government programmes. Collaborate with business organisations or local municipalities associations.
Management Response:
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Governance and planning (SPs before 2018), Women economic empowerment (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: National ownership, Promoting inclusiveness/Leaving no one behind
Organizational Priorities: Partnership
UNEG Criteria: Sustainability
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
All programme ToRs will ensure close engagement with local stakeholders including province and local governments in the designing, implementation and monitoring of the programme interventions, aligning them with the municipal plans and budgets. In addition, UN Women’s collaboration with the UN sister agencies (UNDP and UNCDF) in the Provincial and Local Governance Support Programne will also ensure GESI commitments are mainstreamed in provincial and local planning and budgeting processes. Programme Unit 2020/12 Completed Till December 2020, all the programme ToRs ensure close coordination with the local stakeholders including provincial and local governments during the implementation and monitoring of the NCO’s programme interventions. The Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Task Team meetings have provided significant inputs to NCO to align its programmes with the current need of women and girls including from the excluded groups. The GiHA has facilitated a platform to enable dialogue with the local governments and CSOs. NCO was positioned as lead of SERF Pillar V - Social Cohesion and Community Resilience - of the Socio-economic Response Framework development. To inform its work, the pillar held consultations with various excluded, vulnerable and women’s groups. As part of COVID-19 response, UN women has also conducted four field missions in provinces (1, 2, 3 and 7). Inputs received from stakeholders through these processes and dialogue platforms informed NCO’s COVID-19 response including the design of the comprehensive relief package, women led community kitchens, psycho-social support including for women with disabilities and legal assistance to GBV survivors. Likewise, under the JP for ‘Reorienting public finance for SDGs acceleration and leveraging additional resources in Nepal’- (SDG JP) which is being implemented in collaboration with UNDP and UNCDF, has been endorsed by the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration. Going forward, the SDG JP will be linked to Provincial and Local Governance Support Programme (PLGSP), stepping down on sub-national level Mid-term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), to align provincial and local government’s budgetary process with SDG and NCO, in particular, will ensure that women’s voices are incorporated in the budgetary process. NCO has started preparing a draft of global good practices on gender and SDG aligned budgeting that will inform the SDG JP’s MTEF guideline and reference documents. In February 2021, NCO has entered into a partnership with UNDP to strengthen the mainstreaming of GESI issues across the PLGSP. NCO has prioritized alignment with sub-national priorities in 2021 as well. The concept note for the second phase of the JP RWEE programme reflects the priorities of the relevant provincial and local governments with regard to women’s engagement in agriculture. The concept note has been submitted to the JP RWEE global team in September 2021. Additionally, in line with the Inter-agency letter of agreement with UNDP, GESI training outline has been developed and GESI orientation training was completed in September 2021.
NCO’s monitoring efforts will track linkages and collaboration with province and local governments, including municipalities and rural municipalities, and private sector, contributing to ensuring sustainability and assessing risks of the programmes. This will be done through regular field visits, including meetings with province and local government representatives and other key stakeholders. Programme Unit and Programme Support Unit 2020/12 Completed During this period, NCO continued to strengthen its monitoring system to address the evolving developmental and humanitarian context. The programme implementation risks were also thoroughly reviewed with respective project and programme partners. Further, NCO continued to update its risk register on a quarterly basis. NCO reviews the programme implementation risk on a regular basis in the weekly crisis management team and programme meetings. The programme criticality analysis was carried out to make adjustments to the programme strategies addressing the COVID-19 context. In light of the mobility restrictions due to COVID-19, several virtual meetings were organized with partners as part of periodic monitoring of the programme implementation. In light of the COVID-19 related travel restrictions, NCO continued close monitoring of its partners through online platforms. The local government’s approval, engagement and collaboration in programme implementation are closely tracked by the focal points. Detailed risk-based capacity assessments are carried out for new partnership agreements and are reviewed prior to liquidation and releasing of advance on a periodic basis (quarterly).
Recommendation: Continue work along the supply chain and also invest in demand creation: many donors, federal and local government initiatives focus on skills building, but what is needed is helping women scaling up, branding, business development, quality control, and access to finance. Perhaps interventions supported by WEE should focus more on scaling up. Also invest in demand side by bringing those women have yet to establish link with income generating activities.
Management Response:
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Women economic empowerment (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Capacity development, Promoting inclusiveness/Leaving no one behind
Organizational Priorities: Partnership, Agriculture
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The NCO’s ongoing project on “Leveraging Women’s Leadership and Empowerment in Value Chains (Women in Value Chains Project, July 2018 – June 2021)” will continue to support women for their participation and scaling up in value chains. The support will include business development, product development, greater access to finance, branding, quality control and market linkages. Future programming initiatives to promote WEE will also take into account these considerations in their design. Programme Unit 2021/06 Completed As of June 2021, the value chain project supported 968 women from excluded groups to expand and scale up their business in the project districts. They received technical and business management training, business counselling development support, product design and development and market linkages support. The project has also developed and launched a mobile application to enable these women to access digital market platforms. As of 2020, a total of 200 project participants downloaded and registered their business in the mobile app ‘Mero Pasal-My Shop’. Among them, 57 uploaded their products in the e-commerce platform ‘sabahbazaar.com’ via mobile application. This has not only helped them to gain increased access to technology but also facilitated digital market linkage for sales of their product which has become a new reality in COVID-19 context. In addition, certain activities were re-purposed in light of the COVID-19 context; whereby alternate livelihood opportunities were provided to 700 women in addition to in-kind/raw material support, as part of NCO’s comprehensive approach to COVID-19 response. The in kind supports include both food and non-food items (rice, lentils, oil, salt, sugar, tea, spices, beaten rice, flour, soap, mask, mobile recharge card, sanitary pad, and raw materials for producing masks, PPEs, hand sanitizers and soaps).
Recommendation: A stronger focus on migration upstream: Nepal’s explicit policy of exporting labour abroad has a huge impact (both positive and negative) on Nepali society and especially on women. Whether women are trafficked or excluded returnees, whether they have been sexually assaulted, exploited or whether they have relatives abroad, their lives are being affected. Though this was not a focus of the evaluation the theme emerged in different contexts as a factor influencing WEE: migration can lead to social exclusion for returnees, but it can also provide, financial capital, impetus for risk taking and enterprise spirit, or it can demotivate as remittances can make small scale enterprises un-competitive. All these aspects need further study, to separate myths from reality. But women also need more information and better awareness to migrate safely if they chose to do so. A comprehensive study could be recommended to unfold the issues of women migration and its effect on social dimension. This would also generate valuable insights into barriers and opportunities to WEE.
Management Response:
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Description:
Management Response Category: Partially Accepted
Thematic Area: Women economic empowerment (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management, Advocacy
Organizational Priorities: Normative Support, UN Coordination
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness, Gender equality
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
A range of extensive research on the status of women migrant workers, including returnees, has already been conducted by UN agencies, development partners and civil society organizations in Nepal, including the NCO study “Returning Home: Challenges and Opportunities for Women Migrant Workers in the Nepali Labour Market” in 2017. The NCO, through its ongoing collaboration with the National Women Commission, is also supporting the monitoring report on the status of the implementation of the CEDAW Concluding Observations (COs) to GoN. In the CEDAW COs, Paragraph 36 and 37 focus on the status of women migrant workers. The monitoring report will include a status update on the issues of women migrant workers in line with the CEDAW COs. Results and findings of the existing research and knowledge products will inform NCO to better understand the issues of women migration, its effect on social dimension. In addition, as a member of UNCT’s Taskforce on Migration, the NCO will take forward key joint actions agreed by the taskforce in close collaboration with the taskforce member agencies. Programme Unit 2021/12 Completed The capacity of the National Women’s Commission (NWC) to effectively monitor the implementation of state commitments on gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE) was further strengthened, particularly in line with the implementation of CEDAW Concluding Observations (COs), 2018. The preparation of 13 sets of monitoring questionnaires was developed by the NWC Technical Expert with the funding support of UN Women, as part of the “Support to the National Women’s Machinery to Monitor the Implementation of the CEDAW Concluding Observations” project. Under the leadership of the NWC, the government and key stakeholders developed the “CEDAW Concluding Observations (CO) Monitoring Framework” tool in a highly consultative manner that involved the federal, provincial and local governments. The tool was successfully used to generate data and evidence for the Report on the Implementation of COs, which was published and disseminated by NWC. UN Women provided technical inputs during the design and finalization of the tool. The tool was successfully used to generate data and evidence for the Report on the Implementation of COs, which was published and disseminated by NWC. UN Women provided technical inputs during the design and finalization of the tool. Through UN Women’s coordination, the Report was also presented by NWC to UN agencies working on governance and human rights. This result was attained through UN Women’s technical, funding, coordination and normative support to the NWC to fulfil its mandate to monitor the implementation of CEDAW. . With regard to the four recommendations under ‘Women migrant workers’ in the CEDAW COs, 2018, 37 (a) (b) (c) (d), two recommendations are in the process of implementation and two recommendations have not been implemented. The challenges of returnee migrant women workers have also been included in the weekly situation reports to the Humanitarian Country Team as well as in the Gender Equality updates. Moreover, one of the Gender in Humanitarian Action (GIHA) Task Team meetings organized by UN Women NCO was focused on livelihood and reintegration of returnee women migrant workers. NCO has participated in all Nepal Migration Group and UNCT’s Taskforce on Migration. One of the key recommendations made by UN Women to this group, was to advocate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue guidance to all diplomatic missions to ensure access to information for women migrant workers in their destination countries in line with the guidance note on CEDAW and COVID-19. NCO continued to invest in strengthening the evidence-based research on migration. As part of the Country Gender Equality Profile (CGEP) being developed by the NCO, one of the sub-themes under the chapter on Women’s Economic Security Rights is on Women Migrant Workers. The CGEP will analyse the rationale for women choosing migration; the opportunities for agency and autonomy; challenges and hardships they endure; their contributions to GDP through remittances from overseas/cross-border work migration. The CGEP will be finalised after final review by the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizen in the third quarter of 2022. Additionally, with NCO’s technical and financial support a Rapid Gender Assessment (RGA) was conducted in partnership with the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens, Care Nepal and Save the Children. Some of the key findings are: vulnerable group finding difficulty in assessing basic services; women daily wage-workers and women migrant workers are among the hardest hit by COVID-19 situation; migrant workers facing stigma and discrimination and being accused for spreading COVID-19; and the pandemic is likely to aggravate food insecurity among the existing vulnerable groups, such as landless women, women-headed households with no savings, returnee women migrant workers and single women owing to loss of income. UN Women NCO is using the findings and recommendations from the RGA in new proposals, COVID-19 Preparedness and Response Plan 2021, guidelines, and checklists. The Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizen has been following up with other key line ministries on the implementation of recommendation. Two initial meetings with the key line ministries were held in 2021. With in-kind support from UN Women, women’s organizations particularly Women for Human Rights, Single Women Group (WHR), Aprawashi Mahila Kamdar Samuha Nepal (AMKAS Nepal) and Pourakhi Nepal have provided shelter support to returnee women migrant workers. The shelter homes of WHR and AMKAS Nepal were particularly used for quarantine sites. These two organizations were able to provide their space to returnee women migrant workers from diverse backgrounds such as pregnant and lactating mothers. Pourakhi Nepal also supported returnee women migrant workers who were not accepted by their family members and had difficulty in living in the same household. These three organizations also provided psychosocial support to these women. During the development process of the UN Framework for Responding to the Socio-Economic Impacts of COVID-19 in Nepal, migrant workers (including returnee) were consulted. This evidence has allowed for tailored solutions to respond to specific needs and necessities created by the COVID-19 crisis. Further, the Framework emphasizes the challenges faced by vulnerable and marginalized populations, and the response to provide, ensuring no one is left behind. In 2020, a series of advocacy activities were carried out by the women’s groups with policymakers. These groups drafted a Memorandum on Protecting the Rights of Women Domestic Workers and submitted it to the Hon’ble Minister of Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, Hon’ble Minister of Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens and National Human Rights Commission for necessary actions. After the submission, a press meet was held on 18 June 2021 with media persons, women leaders, experts and organizations working on issues of gender and migration. The key issues highlighted were the need for registration of domestic workers at the Foreign Employment Board to ensure their entitlements and positioning them as respected and dignified labour migrant workers. Additionally, the Women Friendly Disaster Management (WFDM) Group; The Inter-Generational Feminist Thought Leaders’ Group; and Women Humanitarian and Disaster Risk Reduction Platform, in their Charter of Demand, has identified issues of women migrant workers as a key priority among others and called on the Government of Nepal to consider these issues in its COVID-19 response. The Charter of Demands was developed with support from UN Women in collaboration with National Administrative Staff College (NASC); and NCO also supported women’s groups to monitor the implementation of the Charter. The Federal Government expressed its commitment to ensure increased budgeting for gender and inclusion issues (GESI) during the pre-budget consultation organised by the NASC with members of federal parliament and relevant ministries on 21 May 2021. The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development also acknowledged the effort of UN Women and NASC and shared their commitment to take forward the recommendations from the CoDs.
Recommendation: Strengthen the programmatic approach. In a programme the whole needs to be bigger than the sum of the parts. It has to have synergies; A coordinating and facilitation between the various strands and partners are needed. Fostering a common understanding amongst partners of the overall programmatic strategy and the concept of transformational change will help partners becoming partners rather than being service providers.
Management Response:
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Women economic empowerment (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Capacity development, Advocacy
Organizational Priorities: Partnership
UNEG Criteria: Gender equality, Effectiveness, Efficiency
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The NCO will coordinate and organize dedicated sessions/meetings among local implementing partners (Responsible Parties and service providers) working for the same programme or in the same location, to share, reflect and learn from the field experiences and also review progress of the expected results, discuss key challenges and the strategies to overcome them. This will also foster a common understanding amongst partners of overall programmatic strategies and the concept of transformational change. The NCO has identified internal focal points and alternates for the three priority provinces (2, Bagmati-3 and Sudurpashchim-7) to facilitate the above key actions. Programme Unit 2022/12 Completed The NCO convened a Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) partners meeting in August 2020 to share and reflect on the field experience and challenges to implementing programmes in the context of Covid-19. Further, the meeting fostered a common understanding of NCO’s strategic priorities and overall programming. In addition to this, NCO has been providing orientation and refreshers sessions to the partners on both narrative and financial reporting to enable compliance with corporate guidelines. In 2021, NCO provided refresher sessions on results-based reporting and financial reporting to its all partners. The sessions were able to foster the common understanding amongst all partners of the corporate guidelines on results and financial reporting and strengthen their capacity on it. NCO envisions to continue carrying out the regular meetings with its partners and provide refresher sessions on reporting on a quarterly basis. Further NCO has developed a standard checklist for induction package to be provided to new partners. The induction package includes orientations/refresher on: (a) programming priorities; (b) financial management and reporting; (c) results-based narrative reporting; (d) protection against sexual exploitation and abuse; and (e) communications and visibility. The orientation/refresher session is again planned for existing partners in the second quarter of 2022. NCO has been providing an “accompaniment support” for its consultants (in 2020 only) and contractual partners as many of them have been going through difficulties in their personal and professional life because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The accompaniment supports enabled NCO consultants and partners to reflect on their concerns and challenges and know where to access further individual counselling support, if necessary as well as how to overcome the challenges. It also demonstrated how NCO implements its “care” for consultants and partners during the pandemic. The sessions provided to the participants resulted in NCO’s enhanced understanding of the challenges they face, along with ideas on how NCO could help address their predicament. At present, the accompaniment support is also being extended to NCO’s partners’ partners such as LGBTIQ+ communities and women engaged in sex work. The NCO as a lead agency under the joint programme of FAO, WFP and IFAD on “Accelerating progress towards the economic empowerment of rural women in Nepal” (JP RWEE) has been organizing programme partners meeting. These meetings included field level staff and partners of all four participating UN agencies. The meetings have also been supporting to further strengthen the coordination among four participating agencies in the field. This also provided an opportunity to discuss the challenges faced in the field in the current COVID-19 context and identify steps to mitigate those challenges. This coordination meeting has been planned to take place once in each month. Recently, a proposal for the second phase of JP RWEE jointly developed by four participating UN agencies has been submitted to the donor. The NCO also identified provincial focal points for all provinces for effective coordination with provincial governments, UN agencies and other stakeholders. Through the focal points, NCO strengthened the coordination with the provincial government by regular communication also during the provincial cluster meeting and sharing its work on a regular basis through GE updates, knowledge products on GESI, inviting them in GIHA platforms and NCO’s events. Further, NCO ensured the representation of the provincial government in the ongoing programmes through its Responsible parties (RPs). For example, NCO collaborated with Sudurpaschim provincial and local government, UN sister agencies and other local stakeholders to set up a Women’s Holding Center where NCO supported content development, poster design and printing to display messages on GBV and mental health. Moreover, NCO participated in the joint UN missions conducted in four provinces to understand the field realities of COVID-19 and assess the quality of services being provided in quarantine facilities in line with the checklist developed by UN Women under the leadership of and endorsed by the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens. In 2021, NCO with its partner organizations, provided technical and substantive inputs to the provincial level draft bill on Dalit empowerment. For this, a consultation meeting among provincial parliamentarians, human-rights activists, dalit activists in Sudurpachim province.
Continue applying an integrated field monitoring tool which combines quantitative/numeric indicators and qualitative information to systematize to collect and share programmatic learnings. Programme Unit 2022/12 Completed NCO continued to track progress against its Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Plan, which includes progress updates on results and indicators and follow-up actions of the monitoring visits. In the COVID-19 context, NCO has been coordinating weekly programme, crisis management team meetings to discuss the real-time implementation learnings and challenges which has been used during the programme criticality review exercise and integrated in the NCO’s programme (development and humanitarian) strategies. Further, these learnings have guided the development of the annual work plans. NCO has standardized performance monitoring frameworks (PMF) of partners, which are updated on a quarterly basis and validated by respective programme focal points. These monitoring tools have standardized the collection of qualitative and quantitative data from all programmes partners and enabled NCO to integrate learnings into its strategies and plans. Moreover, NCO has also been using an internal tool, “Social Inclusion Disaggregated Matrix” to collect disaggregated information by gender, age, caste/ethnicity, people living with disability and religious minority of the stakeholders including project beneficiaries. This tool was updated in March 2022 based on the recent monitoring guideline of UN Women.
Recommendation: Deepen understanding of target populations by supporting action research projects embedded within interventions to scrutinize how social differences and intersectionality affect women’s ability to fully benefit from interventions or maintain exclusion. Action research promotes reflection and provides the opportunity for live lessons learnt to be applied to change course of interventions. This would help tailoring interventions to specific categories of women more effectively and will focus partners on reflecting and learning what works for who and why/how.
Management Response:
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Partially Accepted
Thematic Area: Women economic empowerment (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management
Organizational Priorities: Culture of results/RBM, Partnership
UNEG Criteria: Gender equality, Human Rights
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Instead of a standalone action research, NCO will take this recommendation forward by embedding qualitative monitoring methodologies directly in programme interventions in the field. The NCO and the Embassy of Finland (EoF) have recognized that traditional quantitative monitoring tools are mostly based on measuring performance against predetermined quantitative targets and tangible change, across thematic areas. In order to fill the gap, the NCO together with EoF is piloting a participatory qualitative monitoring tool to measure social norm change for GEWE through storytelling to capture lived experiences of women. The ambition is to understand how social differences and intersectionality affects women, track the changes in social norms and exclusionary practices which are not always visible and factors that maintain and reproduce discrimination in the lives of women. The findings of this initiative will inform future programming and indicators to measure transformation in gender discriminatory social norms and harmful practices. Programme Unit 2022/12 Completed In 2020, NCO completed the piloting of a survey tool using the storytelling methodology in technical collaboration with the Gender@Work. Building on the findings from piloting of the survey tool, NCO with financial support from the Embassy of Finland is implementing a research to track the invisible changes in social norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes, and the exclusionary practices that maintain and reproduce discrimination in women’s lives. The initiative is being implemented from 2021 to 2026. The baseline research is being conducted in 2022 in 16 local government units of four provinces (Province 2, Bagmati province, Karnali province and Sudurpaschim province). The training to peer enumerators has been completed in early May 2022 and the field data collection will start from late May 2022. Based on the learning from the piloting, two qualitative outcome indicators have also been adopted in the current NCO SN 2018-2022. The qualitative storytelling research initiative aims to measure social norms change by quantifying the inferring social change with confidence. This also enables to understand how the programmes have contributed (or not) to complex social institutions which will also guide the design and adaptation of future programming of NCO.