National Population Policy – 2071

Nepal has its first National Population Policy embraced by the Cabinet. The approach was highlighted when world pioneers had quite recently consented to handle rising populace and development needs taking after the fruitful consummation of 20 years of Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Cairo, 1994.

The policy contains nine focus areas and 78 strategies. It came when the nation is seeing numerous critical statistic changes in the course of the most recent two decades thus of declining fertility and death rates, increasing life expectencies, and expanding migration and urbanization. Revealed on March 30, the population policy, in addition to other things, aims for enhancing people's lives by addressing population issues, development of population, guaranteeing people's reproductive well-being and reproductive rights as crucial human rights and promoting equity and incorporation in all sustainable development strategies.

The arrangement mulls over population and its linkages with other developmental areas as verbalized in the post ICPD framework and strengthens Nepal's dedication that population related issues ought not be isolated from other development agendas. A rights-based approach highly emphasized that will eventually add to balancing the population and accomplish significant demographic targets in 20 years (2015-2034) in accordance with the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to be supported by the UN member states in September 2015.

The National Population Policy of Nepal, 2071 can be summarized in the following points:

1. Establish coordination and cooperation between stakeholders by considering population management as an important part of overall development in order to maintain interdependence between population and development.

2. Develop reproductive health services including sexual health, family planning and safe abortion as a rightful program.

• Increase the accessibility, among all the citizens, of safe sexual and reproductive health by developing it as a basic rights
• Provide information on family planning devices and its utilization, and provision of contraceptives and its utilization
• Fulfill the unmet demand of family planning, increase its distribution and quality of services, and dissemination of relevant information to local level on a regular basis via appropriate media
• Ensure safe abortion and post abortion services. Services will be provided free of cost for women of poor and disadvantages group.
• ANC checkup for the improvement in health of mother and child; expansion of quality health services to address the problem related to delivery and postnatal.
• Special programs for the protection of disadvantages group such as Raute, Kusunda, Chepang, Rajbanshi, Chamr, Musahar, Baadi, Raaji, etc.
• Encourage the marriage only after the age of 20 and birthing procedure only after being capable in terms of psychological, social and economical.
• Conduction of program related to IEC and BCC aiming to increase age at marriage and appropriate birth spacing.
• Addressing the problem of fertility and sub-fertility as per the demand of people.
• Ensure the accessibility of reproductive health and sex education in a comfortable environment for men, women and third gender, and adolescents and youths.
• Advocacy and discussion program to prevent adolescents from drug abuse and sexual abuse
• Expansion of maternal health centered health services to reduce maternal mortality.

3. Build up appropriate lifestyle and environment for healthy livelihood.

4. Effective management of immigration and emigration, and urbanization.

5. Improvement in policy, laws and institutional arrangement to mainstream population and development via inclusion of disadvantageous group (gender, sexual, language, economy, social and region) along with physically, mentally and intellectually disable people

6. Strengthening the institutional structure for policy formulation with program design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in the sector of population.

7. Feedback to concerned agencies for policy formulation and program designing by utilizing information technology in research and analysis of interrelationship between population and development.

8. Formulation of developmental projects and programs only after studying their demographic effects, and implementation of those on the basis of their justification on suitability.

9. Utilization of demographic dividend especially the young people in employment related activities.