NEPAL

 EMPOWERMENT AND POVERTY REDUCTION
  

Even at the dawn of this new millennium, policy-makers and planners still conceive of poverty in the narrow traditional terms of material deprivation. Yet conventional poverty reduction approaches, which focus almost exclusively on income and basic needs, have generally failed to reduce powerlessness and the isolation, vulnerability and marginality in which poor people live - the very factors that perpetuate poverty from one generation to another. For this reason, the Nepal Human Development Report 2004 concentrates on empowerment.

The empowerment approach stresses enhancing people's abilities to realize their basic rights and exercise the freedoms promised by democratic forms of governance. It creates the conditions necessary to enable the poor to take advantage of poverty-reduction opportunities by strengthening their socio-cultural, economic and political capabilities. Empowerment also entails a restructuring of these opportunities themselves:

• on the "supply side", through national action to make state institutions more responsive to citizens and to remove existing social barriers and discriminations - especially those that disempower women, Dalits and Nepal's indigenous peoples;
• on the "demand side", through strengthening the initiatives taken by the poor themselves through social mobilization at the grassroots level.

Together, empowerment and democratic governance structures have the potential to make development equitable and inclusive. If human development flourishes best when it draws on the indigenous capacities of a country, Nepal has many rich sources to mine. The human empowerment analyses set out in these pages pinpoint many of the kinds of intervention essential to reducing inequities and conflict at the local, regional and national levels. In so doing, the Report also provides policy signals for replicating and upscaling the promising practices that Nepal's own citizens have pioneered.

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