Ongoing Projects

The proposed network intends to contribute with more in-depth knowledge of policies that may contribute to a more rapid transition towards inclusive growth with competence building and increasing incomes for the unskilled poor. CMI is combining insights from the partners’ countries and neighboring countries using different methodologies, including RCTs, analysis of survey data, and qualitative methods. The network will build on previous and ongoing research programs that involve the core partners in the network.

The overall objective of this study is to generate evidence to build competencies for future skill requirements of Nepali migrant workers, support the stakeholders and returnee migrant workers and their family members who were affected by the pandemic through the identification of enterprise skill set needs in the field of work, demand needs and support in the design and delivery of relevant reintegration activities. The recommendations of the study will provide practical ways ahead to match the demand and supply in the Nepali local labor market.

The overall objective of the study is to identify the extent, circumstances, factors and nature of informality and decent work deficits in the garbage collection, cleaning, and sanitation sectors in Nepal. The study also aims to put forth policy recommendations to effectively reduce decent work deficits in the garbage collection, cleaning, and sanitation sectors and aid the transition to formality.

 The study, which is being carried out jointly with Gettysburg College in the United States, aims to assess people’s perspectives on the role of various groups in peace processes. The findings will generate information about people’s preferences regarding peace processes, which may then be used to inform similar processes in other parts of the world.

Project Description: The overall objective of the study is to carry out an assessment of the extent to which available data and nationally prioritized SDG targets and indicators at both national and local levels are disaggregated by gender and other variables, viz, caste/ethnicity, social and economic status, region and other variables as required by the SDGs, and specifically related to women migrant workers.

Project Description: The overall objective of the current study is to carry out research for the development of the Nepal Labor Migration Report 2022 by providing a comprehensive overview of labor migration from Nepal with a focus on fiscal years 2019/20 and 2021/2022.

Project Description: The study aims to conduct a mapping and assessment of business practices of selected recruitment agencies by comparing their recruitment process against fair recruitment principles. The study will examine the recruitment practices of the agencies in different steps of the recruitment process and post-deployment, such as sourcing of workers, selection, hiring, and post-deployment engagement with migrant workers.

Project Description: The onset of the COVID­19 pandemic has resulted in many migrant workers becoming particularly vulnerable to economic and social hardships. Temporary migrant workers are concentrated in industries that cannot readily adapt to remote working practices and are usually excluded from social safety nets, thus increasing their precarity. This vulnerability became dramatically visible during the global pandemic as temporary migrant workers were reported to be unemployed, unpaid, and at the mercy of their employers before having to return to their home countries. This proposed project examines the pressing issue of the impacts of COVID­19 on the worsening precarity of temporary labour migrant workers. It uses the case of Nepal to study the consequences of the large­scale return and reintegration of migrant workers to their home countries.

Project Description: This four-year project promotes diversity and inclusiveness through a better understanding of solidarities forming and disintegrating amongst communities invested in lived and living heritage. The project brings together a team of critical and passionate South Asianists, specialising in anthropology, geography, art history, museum and heritage studies, literary studies and conservation architecture. Eight research sites – three cities in India and five in Nepal – were selected lying within 350km from each other, related through cosmologies and transnational histories. Ethnography with qualitative interviews, oral histories and participant observation will provide the key methodological framework within a relational and comparative case study approach. Archival material, bureaucratic frameworks and documentation, media analysis and object studies will enhance the data repertoire.

Website: https://www.sajag-nepal.org/

Batoghato is pioneering communication project: a research-based graphic novel (a book that tells a story via drawings and text) that dramatizes the human stories within a pressing national issue, the politics of road construction in rural districts of Nepal.

Post-publication dissemination activities create contexts for discussion of the book’s themes, for participatory story-telling, and for introductory training so that others can use the graphic novel medium for socially-relevant stories.

Project Description: This project is about a study of the Provincial and Local Government Support Program (PLGSP), a multi-faceted intervention to build the capacity of local government units (LGs) to effectively administer their new powers. The programme is part of Nepal’s 2015 new constitution designed to transition the country to a federal state with three levels of government at federal, provincial and municipal level. This is the first study to provide a rigorous study of a nation-wide federalization on long-term outcomes. In this study, Social Science Baha is collaborating with Carolina Population Centre, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study team includes Co- PIs Sudhanshu Handa and Brigitte Seim (Zimmerman), Public Policy, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Dr. Jeevan Baniya, Assistant Director, Social Science Baha, and Daniel Pamstein, Political Science, North Dakota State University (2020-2023). For more detail, please visit: https://cedilprogramme.org/funded-projects/programme-of-work-1/evaluating-governance-reform-using-a-case-control-approach