Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability as a Pathway to Improved Climate Resilience and Food Security in Nepal
Context
Nepal’s population is largely rural, with only 21 percent living in urban areas and agriculture is the mainstay of livelihoods for around two-thirds of households. Agricultural practices are mostly traditional, rain-fed, and fragmented. Production is low and geared towards subsistence, and as a result, farm incomes are often low. Thirty-eight percent of Nepal's population is still moderately or severely food insecure year-round.
More women than men work in agriculture and their time poverty affects their well-being and interferes with infant and young child feeding and care. Decades of war, political transition, and out-migration of men from rural areas have further contributed to more women in agriculture, with women having increasing responsibility and higher work burden. However, the government response in the form of policies and programs to support women subsistence farmers is limited.
In addition to being one of the lowest income countries in the world plagued by gender inequality and food insecurity, Nepal is also prone to multiple types of hazards and disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. It ranks as the 12th most vulnerable country according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2019. Climate change impacts have a disproportional impact on women and poor vulnerable and socially excluded groups, who often lack the resources, capacities, assets and power to adapt or withstand such shocks and stresses.
Social movements in Nepal still struggle with systematization and have limited ability to influence decision makers. Landless people have had the right since 1990 to farm the land on which they reside, but this land has remained unregistered and cannot be used for any economic purposes. Policies on land, agriculture and food security in Nepal are not sufficiently supportive of the needs of landless people and marginalized farmers, and government lacks the knowledge to work with these groups. Community-led models to build climate resilience remain small-scale and are not integrated within government systems.
Systems-Level Change and Impact
Systems-level change and impact is a crucial step to defeat poverty, increase livelihood security and achieve social justice. Pathways for systems-level change need to go beyond the individual-level to achieve positive shifts in the underlying structures and support mechanisms that create interpersonal, organizational, and institutional systems to operate optimally.
CARE achieves systems-level change through the cumulative effect of its own and its partners’ programs and actions across multiple systems-level pathways to scale (see above), including service systems strengthening and social accountability.
CARE’s “SAMARTHYA: Promoting Inclusive Governance and Resilience for the Right to Food” project in Nepal was implemented in Udayapur, Siraha and Okhaldhunga districts between July 2018 and December 2021. Through employing a number of systems-level pathways SAMARTHYA brought about systems-level change, particularly supporting social movements, social accountability, advocacy for policy change and systems strengthening. The outcomes also improved the lives of the target group around food and nutrition security.
Service System Strengthening and Social Accountability
CARE's Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability (4SA) approaches build the structures and provide checks and balances for the progressive realization of human rights by transforming structural and institutional dimensions of change needed to address the roots of structural inequalities for women, girls and marginalized communities.
SAMARTHYA aimed to strengthen and transform structures and institutions to deliver services in ways that are accountable, equitable, inclusive and effective. SAMARTHYA collaborated with local and provincial government to improve the policy context related to land, agriculture and food security for landless people and marginalized farmers and supported these movements to engage with government and mobilized them to undertake advocacy to facilitate policy change and to hold duty bearers accountable. The project also strengthened government systems and developed and institutionalized climate-resilient scalable models in land and agriculture within government.
SAMARTHYA further strengthened the internal systems and capacity within these social movements, supporting them to become more established and sustainable.
![Thematic Outcome Areas for SAMARTHYA]()
Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability (4SA) Outcomes
Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability (4SA) Outcomes SAMARTHYA adopted an integrated service systems strengthening and social accountability approach (4SA). The project strengthened the capacity of government and its resource partners to ensure quality and responsive services in land, agricultural, climate change and food security, including to develop posters and leaflets for mass dissemination, supporting the delivery of quality seeds and supplies, strengthening the timing of service delivery and the availability of human resources.
A key success was the agreement with local government for one technician to be made available per ward, who provided agricultural extension services to producer groups, which significantly improved service delivery mechanisms. This led to enhanced quality and quantity of agricultural extension services and subsidized production inputs support, such as seeds, irrigation facilities, tools, agricultural insurance and minimum support price for farmers’ products. This minimum price support covered major cereal crops, including rice, maize and wheat. These steps enhanced products, service reliability, service responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The provision of these services, particularly subsidized production inputs (previously unavailable to the target groups) were strongly facilitated by SAMARTHYA supporting government to adopt The Farmer Identity Card (FID), and the Identification, Verification and Recording (IVR) model. The FID not only improved access to inputs, but motivated farmers to expand their products to a semi-commercial scale, reflecting intersections between supporting systems strengthening and inclusive markets approaches. These activities were complemented by social accountability actions on their right to food by the organized and mobilized farmers and landless groups. The project supported these groups to hold duty bearers accountable for the services they provided, particularly within local-level committees, leading to service provision that is more response to the needs of landless, women and marginalized farmers.
Long-Term Impact Due to Systems-Level Change and Accountability
Empowerment and leadership skills: Increased life skills and leadership skills among landless and smallholder farmers to claim their rights. Increased participation in the municipal decisions which affect their lives.
Increased access to resources: Greater access to direct resources from local government to support climate-smart farming production, including subsidies (benefiting 1069 households).
Gender equality and women’s empowerment: Women now play a greater role in decision-making structures, and benefit from more inclusive social movements. Women show leadership in model development and scaling. Significant changes at household level in gender relations, with women having greater mobility, financial decision-making, improved reproductive autonomy, and reductions in violence against women.
Livelihoods and economic development: Income generation through selling their extra production in local markets and transitioning from subsistence farming to semi-commercial activities. Women recognized as farmers and entrepreneurs due to their new land entitlement and FID, with greater access to trade opportunities and local markets.
Food and nutrition security: Landless people, marginalized farmers and women increase their food intake. Strengthened climate resilience among these groups supports responses to climatic shocks and stresses.
Health outcomes: Significant improvement in health of women and children due to consumption of diversified food and reduced incidents of low birth weight of a newborn children.
Keys to Attaining Successful Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability
Effective Civil Society Organization (CSO)-government collaboration is central to success: Effective partnership and network building between local governments is key to achieving policy change. The strong culture of co-creation and partnership between the CSOs and government is essential in the successful planning, development, implementation and scale-up of the climate resilient models.
Working with social movements requires not only supporting technical capacity but also internal systems: Supporting social movements’ financial, operational and management systems is key to building strong foundations. Enhanced credibility of these movements among their communities and the government not only improve their ability to influence change, and strengthened project outcomes, but lead to these CSOs jointly sharing resources for interventions, thus supporting sustainability.
Institutionalization is important for systems-level change: The integration of the climate-resilient models within the local level acts, policies and practices, and the support of local power holds to do so, is important for systems-level change. In areas where project models have not been endorsed or institutionalized within local acts, ongoing use and sustainability can be challenging.
Scaling should be local and not only institutional: Scaling and replication can take place successfully not only through government, but through local CSOs that continue to expand use of the project models.
Local models are key to addressing climate risks and can be easily scaled: Climate-resilient farmer friendly models and technologies at community level are highly effective and adoptive in the face of climate risks. These models need to be deliberately tailored to the local context to directly address local challenges and beneficiaries’ needs. The support and ownership from local government and CSO partners facilitate the institutionalization of these models within their own local government and CSOs system. Moreover, these CSOs and local government initiate the scaling up and out of these models to a national level.
Walk the talk on gender equality: Gender equality and social inclusion approaches designed within projects help achieve visible results in communities. Gender-sensitive interventions support ‘spill-over’ effects in visible outcomes and impact in the community.
Projects should more deliberately employ systems-levels approaches: SAMARTHYA was not originally a systems-level project, but used a number of strategies that speak to each of the pathways. Working to support programs to deliberately integrate the pathways from the outset can lead to greater impacts.
This blog was derived from the findings and reports of CARE’s SAMARTHYA project in Nepal. To learn more about SAMARTHYA, please access the final report here.
Related Resources
CARE's Service Systems Strengthening and Social Accountability Approach
Evaluating Systems-level change and impact Findings from the evaluation of the SAMARTHYA project in Nepal
