Nepal Sanitation and Hygiene Master Plan

A national sanitation strategy endorsed by the government of Nepal in 2011, built on broad stakeholder agreement over minimum sanitation criteria and coordination mechanisms across the country's sanitation sector. The Master Plan adopted a no-subsidy principle as its basic implementation approach, allowed for locally designed support mechanisms to reach the most vulnerable households, and required household toilets to be built to a permanent standard through the plinth level to avoid the cost of later reconstruction, all organized around a staged national target of eliminating open defecation by 2017 through interim coverage milestones of 60 percent by 2012/13 and 80 percent by 2014/15. Although the original 2017 target was not met on schedule, sustained implementation of the Master Plan's approach eventually led Nepal to declare itself open-defecation-free nationwide in 2019, a milestone the government and international partners marked as a major sanitation achievement for the country.