Nepal: Current Situation
Nepal is among the poorest, least developed countries in the world. 25 per cent of the population lives on less than US $0.50 per day. (Source: UN World Food Programme) Malnutrition rates are alarming:
one in three children under 5 years is stunted from hunger. In the the mountains, poverty and stunting are much worse – almost half the children are stunted. Child mortality rates are high, in remote mountain villages where common childhood diseases carry them away (these figures are related to poverty and low literacy rates).
Exclusion, abject poverty and hunger erupted into civil war in 1996. The killing and destruction raged for ten years; it left no one untouched. The end of the war saw what little infrastructure there had been destroyed. Since then, continued political instability, corruption, high prices, the pandemic and extreme natural disasters have pushed the country further into chaos and hunger. Massive earthquakes in 2015 killed thousands and displaced many more. In the mountains, the farmers lost everything—their homes, their tools and their livelihoods.
At SMD School, we survived the 2015 earthquakes without injuries, but had lost 30 per cent of our building space. We had to use the money that was meant for a new school (outside the valley/liquefaction risk) to repair and retrofit our buildings. We are now working to recoup the money we’ve lost so we can build safer accomodations.
Learn more about Nepal’s air pollution problem from The Himalayan Times.
The Kathmandu Valley is an active seismic zone – “The Kathmandu Basin is a broad valley in the foothills leading to the high Himalayas. This valley was formerly the site of a lake within which up to 600 meters of thickness of river delta and lake sediment accumulated. Compared to bedrock around and beneath the basin, seismic waves from the Gorkha earthquake caused these lake sediments to shake like Jello in a bowl.”
Learn more about Nepal’s earthquake risk from IRIS Education & Public Outreach: 2015 Nepal Earthquake Presentation Tectonics & Earthquakes of Himalaya—2015 Nepal EQ