Recognizing the existing challenges and opportunities amidst the changing landscape and centre staging  rural women’s agency and rights, the four UN agencies  -the United Nations for Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UNWOMEN) and the World Food Programme (WFP) – have come together to deliver as one, to accelerate progress for the economic empowerment of rural women and to assist rural women to lift themselves out of poverty, while promoting the equitable and inclusive growth of Nepal. The four agencies are working together for the first time to expand on innovative models and building on their respective strengths: FAO’s policy assistance on agriculture and food security; IFAD’s experience on rural investment programmes; WFP’s food assistance and health and nutrition innovations; and UN Women’s leadership and technical expertise on foreign labour migration and reintegration.

The Joint Programme (JP) has been designed as a follow up on commitments of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution on “the improvement of the situation of women in rural areas”, in November 2011, which reiterated a focus on rural women’s economic empowerment. It is in line with the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its follow up process which reaffirm the role of rural women in sustainable development and climate change. The programme also takes forward the commitments of the Istanbul Plan of Action (IPoA) – in the development of which Government of Nepal played a leading role – that calls for focused intervention on agriculture development with increased investments.

The programme will consist of two phases: the preparatory phase of 6 months in 2015 and the implementation phase of five years from 2016-2020, which includes an inception stage. The preparatory phase of the programme will be conducted with the financial support from the Government of Norway in 2015. In this phase the management modality, programme implementation details, including selection of districts and VDCs will be finalized in close collaboration with MoAD. Joint visits by the MoAD, other sectoral ministries and UN agencies involved in the programme will be conducted to the proposed districts mainly to facilitate the coordination mechanism and to agree on the district and VDC selection based on the criteria that will be developed later.

Identification of the districts and VDCs will be done through a cluster approach to facilitate effective and coordinated implementation and other operational management. The inception phase of the implementation of the programme will include capacity assessments of partners and fine-tuning of the project activities in consultation with the key stakeholders. It will develop a monitoring and evaluation framework while developing an information management system to support effective implementation. Baseline data will be collected in the initial stage of the implementation phase. The revised progremme document will be endorsed by the Steering Committee at the end of the inception phase.

The goal of the programme is to secure rural women’s livelihoods and rights ensuring sustainable development in the post conflict context of Nepal. To achieve this goal, four outcome areas have been provisionally identified based on the context specific issues and potentials, and within the framework of the global programme. Within each outcome area, a number of outputs and indicative activities have been formulated that build specifically on identified needs and opportunities.

• Outcome 1 – Rural Nepalese women and their families have improved food and nutrition security
• Outcome 2 – Rural women have increased income to secure their livelihoods
• Outcome 3 - Rural women’s representation and leadership is strengthened in local communities for gender responsive governance
• Outcome 4 – A gender responsive policy environment is secured for the economic empowerment of Nepalese rural women

The preparatory phase of RWEE Nepal will support the design and launch the 5-year evidence-based RWEE targeting the economic and social empowerment of rural women in Nepal nased on the consolidation of research, evidence-based practices and lessons learned from the field, and ownership from critical, local, national and regional stakeholders.