Nepal has gone through many changes in the last several years with regards to management of NGOs. In this article, we will share with our friends and supporters the ways in which we interact with the government and how those interactions are shaping our future.

Hari Prasad Tripathi

Currently, we are registered in the Kathmandu district, one of the 75 administrative districts in Nepal. When we apply for renewal each year, we are required to submit a work plan, which includes permissions from all the districts in which we work. Thus, we need to obtain official permission from each district development office, a task carried out by our area coordinators. However, before the districts’ issue permissions for work, they require that we obtain a letter of recommendation for each student we select from village development committees (VDC), small administrative divisions within districts. The rationale for this is that VDC officials are in a good position to verify that the students we select are in fact deserving of third-party assistance. In our experience, it takes several days to obtain these student recommendation letters from the VDC and up to several weeks to obtain the letter from the district development office. Because our work is related to education, we must also obtain an approval letter from the district education office for a total of three letters needed to proceed. Only after we produce these three letters for each area in which we operate will the Kathmandu district administration renew our registration. 

In addition, the government of Nepal requires each NGO to obtain approval of its program from the Social Welfare Council before any fund transfer takes place. This process also takes anywhere from several days to several weeks. With the new constitution, Nepal has welcomed a federal set-up. The procedures and permits may change as new laws are enacted to implement the federal set-up envisioned in the constitution.

Implications

As these new laws begin to take shape and are put into practice, there are several implications for our organization.

Student selection: We work to align the student selection decision that we have made and the recommendation from the VDC. The students we select come from financial backgrounds such that they do not have any difficulty obtaining a recommendation from the government. This recommendation step, although it adds some work, could help us provide additional verification of what we know about the students, and can be leveraged to benefit our organization.

Volunteer time: The volunteers who coordinate activities in each area must obtain permissions from three different government offices which can take several weeks. The volunteers in Kathmandu who maintain our legal presence spend 5-10 days each year visiting government offices and working on permits. None of these tasks can be done online or on the phone. It is astounding that we have managed to take care of this work with a volunteer-only approach; we do not have paid staff.

Types of volunteers: It is becoming increasingly difficult for casual volunteers who want to spend a few hours per week to start a new area due to the large overhead in obtaining the permissions mentioned above. The only volunteers who can perform the tasks to start and maintain legal presence in their respective areas are those with connection and experience. Young professionals and students who want to volunteer on weekends will find it challenging just to get started.

Types of areas: Given the overhead of maintaining a legal presence in each area, it is better for us to create areas with 20-40 students so the fixed effort of overhead can benefit a larger number of students. We have seen these trends in the last few years as we began to support larger and larger numbers of students in Inaruwa and Nepalgunj. When we evaluate applications for new areas, we explicitly take into account their ability to scale up in future years before we approve work in new areas.

Federal set-up: In the next year or two, Nepal will pass laws to implement the federal set-up envisioned in the new constitution. It is unknown how different states will regulate the activities of NGOs within each state and the activities of NGOs that are registered in a different state. We remain ready to adapt to the changing legal climate, however it evolves, while fulfilling our mission of giving the gift of education to the children of Nepal.