Background Information
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is an operational arm of the United Nations, supporting the successful implementation of its partners' peacebuilding, humanitarian and development projects around the world. Mandated as a central resource of the United Nations, UNOPS provides sustainable project management, procurement, and infrastructure services to a wide range of governments, donors, and United Nations organizations. With over 6,000 personnel spread across 80 countries, UNOPS offers its partners the logistical, technical, and management knowledge they need, where they need it. By implementing around 1,000 projects for our partners at any given time, UNOPS makes significant contributions to results on the ground, often in the most challenging environments.
UNOPS Nepal Context:
Since 2015, UNOPS has engaged closely with the Government of Nepal and several development partners in development efforts of the Government of Nepal including the modernization of the Nepal Police, the post-earthquake assessment of damaged buildings, and the enrollment of beneficiaries into housing grant schemes. UNOPS has helped to improve policing services. It has supported homeowners engaged in the reconstruction process, retrofitting damaged houses, and reconstruction of disability-friendly schools. It has also delivered essential equipment to support COVID-19 response efforts.
The functional objective of UNOPS Nepal is to deliver its projects efficiently and effectively in alignment with government priorities following UNOPS rules and regulations. This is to drive forward the outcomes sought by the clients and funding partners and contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while ensuring gender, diversity, and inclusion are mainstreamed in all its work for the people of Nepal.
Project Information:
FCDO’s Security and Justice Programme (SJP) is a five-year programme (2023-27) with an anticipated budget of up to GBP 35 million. The programme will continue the recently completed Integrated Programme for Strengthening Security and Justice (IPSSJ)’s dual focus on tackling criminal violence, in particular gender-based violence (GBV), and supporting respective Government entities, including Nepal Police, to strengthen their services.
Building on the ongoing Launch of the SJP (Inception Phase), the multi-year SJP will support more representative, accountable, and responsive policing and also help tackle gender-based violence in Nepal. The programme will contribute to the following result areas:
1. Security and justice providers have improved their capacity to serve the public and manage relationships with communities, leading to increased public safety with increased trust from people in the state.
2. Security and justice institutions at the Provincial and Palika levels have effective, accountable, inclusive, and sustainable systems in line with the federal constitutional mandates to improve their skills and better manage their resources to meet people’s security and justice needs.
3. Decreased prevalence of GBV led by increased access to services for those who seek them.
The 2015 constitution of Nepal, envisages the devolution of policing in Nepal into 7 provincial Police Services and a Federal Police Organization (Nepal Police) in the federal sphere. How they combine to provide policing services in Nepal remains a work in progress. It will be highly complex in terms of changes in legislation, policy, administration, and organizational culture, even while standards of coordination and delivery must be maintained across the whole country. The changes will require new ways of working under SJP and create new needs to which UNOPS will seek maximum impact in its project period in at least three target provinces.