KATHMANDU, Dec 26: JICA’s 12 B NPR Emergency Housing Reconstruction Project has successfully completed.
The Emergency Housing Reconstruction Project (EHRP) funded by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) was successfully completed earlier to originally targeted completion date.
On this occasion, a closing ceremony was organized virtually on 25th December 2020. The ceremony was attended by NRA CEO Sushil Gyewali, NRA Secretary Mr Suresh Acharya, Ambassador of Japan to Nepal Mr Masamichi Saigo, JICA Chief Representative Ms Yumiko Asakuma and several other high ranking officials from NRA, Central Level Project Implementation Units, District Level Project Implementation Units, etc.
EHRP is a Japanese ODA loan project amounting JPY 12 billion equivalent to about NPR 12 billion. Main objective of EHRP was to restore and improve the living condition of the victims of the Nepal Earthquake 2015, by reconstructing the destroyed and damaged houses using an adequate seismic standard of construction.
With the principle of Build Back Better (BBB), EHRP provided technical assistance to more than 95,000 housing reconstruction beneficiaries in the target areas of Gorkha and Sindhupalchok. EHRP also provided financial assistance to the Government of Nepal for providing housing grant.
The housing grant was provided to about 34,000 beneficiaries who successfully completed earthquake-resilient houses. As of November 2020, almost 90% of beneficiaries have already completed their house construction in JICA’s target area.
The Community Mobilization Program (CMP) was one of key factor for success of housing reconstruction which optimized the power of community and promoted mutual support. It also created job opportunity to over 500 mobile masons, who were instrumental in assisting the house owners for reconstruction.
Speaking on the closing ceremony, Ambassador Saigo recalled his field visit to EHRP area where the mobile mason, house owner, technical support staff and the whole community were working together in a well organized way and shared his observation on the reason behind of completing the project successfully before the original schedule.
Ms Asakuma, Chief Representative of JICA Nepal highly appreciated NRA’s initiatives of documenting the learning from reconstruction and passing it to the new agency responsible for DRR, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority for institutionalization of the practical learning.
NRA CEO Gyewali highly acknowledged the CMP, which was highly effective to synergize the well grounded Nepali culture of mutual help saying that the CMP not only was instrumental in expediting reconstruction but also in strengthening the social capital of community cohesion.
Housing reconstruction will still continue to materialize leave-no-one-behind, even though EHRP funded by JICA is closed, JICA stated in a press release.
