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ABSTRACT
Lack of secure employment mobilized many young people into Nepal’s civil war and a decade of political opposition (1996–2006). As a result, both the post-war government and foreign donors invested in policies aimed to harness the productive capacities of young people in restructuring the nation. This article explores the theme of aspiration on the national and personal level and their convergence through a micro-finance program in post-war Nepal, the Youth, Small Enterprise, and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF). The national-level aspiration to make ‘new Nepal’ hinged on young people fulfilling their personal aspirations. I consider whether post-conflict pacification measures like YSEF can foster the sense of national belonging necessary by analyzing the challenges faced in instituting this loan scheme nationally and locally along Nepal’s open border with India. Analyzing YSEF’s institution from a borderland optic reveals assumptions inherent in peacebuilding intervention and limits YSEF’s ability to wholly accommodate its recipients. I suggest that the government’s attempt to bring marginalized youth into the ‘official’ economic fold through YSEF falls short in accommodating young people’s livelihood aspirations within their lived reality. Instead young people are creating pathways beyond state dependence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The youth unemployment rate for those aged 15–29 is 6%, with urban youth unemployment at 16% (ILO Citation2008). 83% of youth work in agriculture and 74% of the entire workforce is involved in the agriculture sector, which makes up 36% of GDP (Nepal Ministry of Finance Citation2012). 7.1% of Nepal’s population is absent for six months or more working abroad and remittances make up 29.2% of national GDP (World Bank Group Citation2013).
2 Parsa district was not part of the Maoist heartland. As a border district, it was nevertheless affected by the war as Maoist combatants surreptitiously crossed into India and smuggled goods in and out to finance the war. Parsa district youth were targeted as a high-risk demographic because of their participation in the Madheshi Movement of 2007–2008, which undermined peace talks and pressured the interim government to include federalism in the state-restructuring agenda before the Constituent Assembly Elections were held in 2008 (cf. Jha 2013).
3 Educated in this context was those who completed class 10 (typically around age 16) and passed their School Leaving Certificate (SLC), which is Equivalent to the British Commonwealth General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), or higher.
4 This literature’s focus is mainly of young men due in part to the different socio-cultural expectations of young men and young women in developing South Asia, which enable educated young men to ‘time-pass’ in public (Jeffrey Citation2010) but young women have domestic labor duties regardless of their educational standing. Although not purposeful, my research of educated YSEF loan recipients limited my pool of interlocutors to mainly men for similar reasons. Their female peers were less likely to apply for YSEF loans because they were either busy with their studies in the district headquarters perhaps teaching part-time while residing at the campus hostel, preparing for school or government exams while assisting with household duties in their paternal home, or were married and busy with domestic labor in their husband’s home while possibly working outside the home.
5 I thank Tracey Skelton and Suzanne Naafs for inviting me to the workshop this paper was initially presented at and their invaluable feedback in getting it into article form. I appreciate the keen suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers and Children’s Geographies’ editorial board for shepherding this article through to publication.
6 This research was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council Grant (ES/J011444/1). It was conducted for the ‘Alchemists of the Revolution? The politics of youth unemployment in South Asia’ project which was housed in University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment.
7 The fund is worth 4.5 billion NR, which comes from the Deprived and Marginalized Sector fund. The government itself has contributed 1.5 billion between 2008-2012. For more details see World Bank Report, ‘Migration and Entrepreneurship in Nepal’ (Citation2013).
8 Banks used to oversee this fund themselves as a program of corporate charity, but this changed under finance minister Bhattarai in 2008. People from the private banking sector expressed frustration because they felt they should have control over how their profits are spent, they no longer get social credit for their charity, and many believe the government mismanages the funds or they don’t reach the intended sector.
9 I asked everyone why the age-range was up to fifty if it is meant to be for youth. Most respondents justified it by saying someone of fifty has enough time to start a viable enterprise. The vice-chairman of the YSEF fund asserted there is a comma (in Nepali tatha) between youth and small enterprise which indicates the loans scheme is for youth & small enterprises.
10 When I spoke with the fund’s vice-chairman about this issue he said that the current instituting mechanisms are still quite new and not fully operational. YSEF have signed an MOU with HELVETAS and UNDP to try and match loan recipients with specialized training.
11 The government has an Agricultural Development Bank present in most districts, which they rely on to distribute the loan in the district headquarters. The cooperatives applied to participate and were rigorously vetted before being awarded a contract to distribute and oversee the loan in villages.
12 Only about an eighth of my interviewees had met a national monitor, and of those who did, they all received their loan through a community cooperative.