NDM finalists announced

The 25 finalists — for Nepal Development Marketplace (NDM)-2008, branded as 'Lau Na Aba Ta Kehi Garau' contest, a collaborative effort between the World Bank (WB) and the Nepal Poverty Alleviation Fund (PAF) — has been announced here today.
The 25 finalists will receive grant awards from a Rs 37.5million ($6,00,000) award pool funded by a partnership between the WB and PAF,according to the WB. Each winner will get approximately Rs 1.5 million to implement their innovative ideas aimed at delivering basic services and expanding livelihood opportunities in rural population.
"The innovative and homegrown solutions — to deliver basic services to rural communities — that were presented here today have a huge potential to make a difference in the lives of poor," Susan Goldmark, WB country director for Nepal, said, adding that peace and development are interrelated. "Without peace, it will be difficult to have development and conversely, without development, there will be no peace.”
Earlier, fifty innovative ideas and inventive partnerships from across the country had entered in the final round of NDM-2008. The technical assessors three weeks ago had selected top 50 proposals for graduation to the national competition. All the fifty finalists were today invited to submit detailed proposals for today's final competition.
An independent jury of eminent personalities like Anuradha Koirala and Kumar Thapa, examined the detailed proposals received from the finalists and interviewed them before selecting the winners.
The finalists range from grass-roots service providers, including public sector development agencies, community based organisations and NGO, to schools and universities, as well as private sector businesses. The enterprising ideas and creative partnerships focus on improvements in the delivery of basic services in education, health, water and sanitation, agriculture, irrigation and food security, financial services, small business and micro-enterprise support, energy, information and communication technologies, infrastructure, integrated rural development and employment creation.
The cash awards will be provided to apply fresh approaches to peace-building through development for a period of one year beginning from July 1.
A nation-wide publicity campaign during March and April has attracted nearly 500 eligible entries reflecting the theme 'Securing Peace Through Development' by the time the call for proposals closed on April 30. Since then, a technical team composed of over forty development practitioners, sectoral experts and journalists screened and ranked all proposals against a set of assessment criteria and narrowed down the most promising proposals to a short-list of 215. The criterion included innovation, partnership, sustainability, replicability, impact and cost-effectiveness.
NDM was last held in 2005. It is a competitive programme sponsored by the WB and various partners that use a transparent process to identify and support grassroot initiatives.