Engaging Communities in National Development: The Experience of Nepal

Sharma KK¹*

1. Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS), Mandikhatar, Kathmandu, Nepal

With nearly 38 per cent of the population living below poverty line and a per capita income of US $269, Nepal remains one of the poorest countries in South Asia. As one of the strategies to address the problem of acute poverty, the government has been implementing social mobilization programs since 1951.These programs can be broadly categorized as holistic and targeted, the first covering all members of a community and the later only the deprived members.

Their Major strengths of programs include their ability to make significant positive impacts on livelihood, gender, community decisions, distribution of benefits, social- economic status and capacity to make decision. The major shortcoming of the program is that the ultra poor still remain indifferent or apathetic to most social mobilization programs for a number of reasons. These reasons can be subsumed as lack of capacity, debt trap, social and economic exploitation, low credit worthiness, loss of land and other assets, expensive service delivery, feeling of insecurity, high population growth, wasteful consumption habits, cultural barriers, health hazard, farming trap and fatalism.

The paper elaborates the strengths and shortcomings of the programs and the reasons underlying them. It also consolidates a series of relevant recommendations as made by earlier studies to make the social mobilization programs in general and the participation of the ultra poor more effective in particular. The paper assesses the recommendations from the pragmatic perspectives and adds value to them.

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