Surveying Livelihoods Service Delivery and Governance: Baseline evidence from Nepal

In 2012/13, SLRC implemented the first round of an original cross-country panel survey in Nepal designed to produce information on:

• people’s livelihoods (income-generating activities, asset portfolios, food security, constraining and enabling factors within the broader institutional and geographical context)
• their access to basic services (education, health, water), social protection and livelihood assistance, and
• their relationships with governance processes and practices (participation in public meetings, experience with grievance mechanisms, perceptions of major political actors).

This paper reports on the baseline findings emerging from statistical analysis of the Nepal first-round data.

We collected survey data from a sample of 3,176 households in September to November 2012. Although the sample was drawn from three districts – Rolpa, Bardiya and Ilam (purposively selected in order to capture geographic variation in conflict, physical accessibility and access to services) – our data are not representative at the district level. They are representative, however, at the village level, and are statistically significant at the study, district and village level.