The UN Joint Programme (JP) of support to the Local Governance and Community Development Programme (LGCDP) will bring together the activities of five UN agencies – UNDP, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNV and UNCDF.

The JP itself will be fully aligned with the overall framework provided by LGCDP, a national programme of the Government of Nepal, and will be subject to the wider programme’s set of management, work planning and implementation arrangements. As such, the JP shares the same goal, purpose, outcomes and outputs as LGCDP and will therefore contribute towards poverty reduction in Nepal through improved and more inclusive local governance and service delivery.

Specifically, the JP will build on the experiences of different UN agencies in the areas of decentralization, local governance and community-led development and support the implementation of a range of activities related to: (i) community empowerment, participation and involvement in local governance processes; (ii) the provision of carefully designed and expanded block grants to all tiers of the local government system in Nepal; (iii) capacity building of local governance and service delivery stakeholders; (iv) the piloting and fine-tuning of local level service delivery mechanisms and processes; (v) the establishment of a policy environment conducive to good local governance, community-led development and decentralized service delivery; (vi) developing national level capacities to support local governments and decentralized service delivery; and (vii) core administrative and logistical support.

The JP, as an integral element of LGCDP, will leverage the comparative advantages offered by the five UN agencies in ways that contribute towards attaining the objectives of the wider Government programme and in a manner that facilitates the implementation of LGCDP as a whole. LGCDP has been designed so as not to pre-empt any major policy decisions on future sub-national state structures which emerge from the constitutional processes now underway and – conversely – to provide assistance to help the Government develop and implement policy frameworks in line with any such new directions.