NEPAL

Programs

Strengthening Planning and Monitoring Capacity of NPC (SNPC)

Background

The National Planning Commission (NPC) is the body responsible for producing Nepal’s development plans. It sources and allocates resources for the country’s economic development and is the central agency for monitoring and evaluating development plans, policies and programmes. UNDP has worked with this body on many occasions including to produce the 2001, 2004 and 2009 Nepal Human Development Reports and for targeting the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the country’s national plans.

Project Brief

The Strengthening Planning and Monitoring Capacity of NPC project is supporting the apex national planning body to make Nepal’s planning and monitoring development results-oriented, evidence-based, MDG sensitive and gender and social inclusion responsive.

The project is helping mainstream the achievement of the MDGs and gender and social inclusion issues into national planning by assisting the production of major planning documents and by building up the capacity of NPC staff. Towards achieving this, the project has supported the production of two major reference documents on Nepal’s achievement of the MDGs, helped integrate the achievement of the MDGs and gender and social inclusion issues into the national plan for 2010/11 to 2012/13 and helped develop a model for forecasting economic trends.

MDG progress report, 2010 — Nepal’s latest report to the United Nations General Assembly on its progress towards the MDGs was published in September 2010. The project covered all the costs of this joint NPC–UNDP report on the progress towards the eight goals and 21 targets. This was the most rigorous MDG progress report yet with separate write-ups on each target and the inclusion of new targets relevant for Nepal, including one on achieving full and productive employment. For the first time the write-ups pointed out the differences in levels of achievement between people from different social

groups, although data is still lacking to show this. The report concluded that Nepal is likely to achieve six of the eight goals by 2015.

MDG needs assessment, 2010 — At the same time the project supported the NPC to produce the MDG needs assessment. This document was published in August 2011 and estimates that it will take about US $20 billion for Nepal to achieve the MDG targets by 2015. The project provided expertise and training that enabled the nine sectoral working committees to produce their cost estimates. The report estimates that only 68% of the amount needed is available with particularly large resource gaps for achieving the education and environment MDGs .

In 2012 the project will;

• Assist the NPC to establish macro-economic modeling as an important point of reference for planning decisions;

• Train NPC and other ministry personnel on strategic planning and monitoring and evaluation, focusing on how to use the information produced; and

• Assist NPC to integrate and make functional the national Poverty Monitoring and Analysis System (PMAS), District PMAS (DPMAS) and Project Performance Information System (PPIS) monitoring systems and to ensure that the information they produce is useful and is used.

Project details