Nepal has made significant progress in the past few years in poverty reduction. It has to graduate from a least developed country status to a developing country status by 2030 as per the new development goals.

For graduation, Nepal needs to double its GDP per capita and further reduce the number of people living below the poverty line. Based on the Thirteenth Plan, our government had prepared an approach paper on LDC graduation through the support of UNDP.

Nepal is facing a protracted transition period as its primary challenge in the present scenario. It continued efforts to extend access to justice for marginalized people in 2014.

UNDP also continued to broaden and deepen its support for effective local governance through the extension of training on bottom-up planning processes to over 61,000 local stakeholders across more than 1,500 VDCs.

Nepal has tremendous potential for development and job creation through rural enterprises. Such enterprises make sustainable use of natural resources.

However, lack of skills, education and awareness continues to exacerbate underemployment and underdevelopment. UNDP’s work in Nepal on poverty and sustainable development has been designed around two broad pillars, namely employment creation and policy support in pro-poor development planning and monitoring.

Micro-Enterprise Development Program (MEDEP) continues to support the Government of Nepal (GON) to implement its Micro–Enterprise Development for Poverty Alleviation (MEDPA) project in 50 districts, creating more than 6,600 micro-entrepreneurs through the funding of the Australian Government.

UNDP’s direct intervention created an additional 4,700 such enterprises in the same year.

UNDP’s MEDEP has demonstrated a viable model of poverty alleviation and social inclusion through optimal use of natural resources, indigenous skills and collaboration for sustainable livelihoods according to the gender and Social Inclusion Impact study of the project, conducted in 2014.

Employment and income generation are the key areas of UNDP’s work towards alleviating chronic poverty and creating peace dividends.

UNDP is supporting the National Planning Commission and the Central Bureau of Statistics to promote pro-poor and evidence-based monitoring and evaluation, planning and policy.