Nepal

Over the past 10 years Nepal has made a more concerted effort to raise awareness and formulate clearer sanitation policies. Considerable change has resulted.

The importance of sanitation was noted in national planning documents, giving recognition to the health and environmental impacts of the lack of coverage for more than 60% of the population. This focus was most evident in the development of the 8th Five Year Plan (1992-1997), and the commitment to improved sanitation coverage was further expanded in the 9th Five Year Plan (1997-2002). The high goals of the latter were ambitious - to double the population coverage of sanitation by 2002.

International attention to Nepal's sanitation coverage is in part responsible for these advances. Meetings of the regional South Asia nations' forum (SAARC) in 1992 brought out the very low position of Nepal in relation to its neighbours. The 1992 Enhanced 8th Five Year Plan increased the allocation for water and sanitation four-fold and called for organizational changes to support improved and expanding sanitation implementation. In 1994 Nepal adopted the National Sanitation Policy Guidelines for Planning and Implementation of Sanitation Programmes and, in 1995, formed National and District Water Supply and Sanitation Coordination Committees. These new Nepalese government commitments in turn spurred increased international donor support for sanitation.

These new national policies were accompanied by considerable political and governmental support when they were first created and this important high-level backing continued in 2002 with a renewed push to endorse a national sanitation policy agenda. Implementation programmes however have ebbed and flowed, largely because the enthusiasm for sanitation-specific policies and programmes has not been accompanied by continued budget allocations or attention to decentralised management.