The Project for Promotion of Nepal National Building Code Compliance for Safer Building Construction

Nepal

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)

June 2021 - May 2025

Position

Building Information Management

Type of Service

SDGs

Ministry of Urban Development implemented “the Project for Assessment of Earthquake Disaster Risk for the Kathmandu Valley,” which revealed more than one million evacuees would be forcefully evacuated due to tremendous number of building damages if a central southern Nepal earthquake would hit. Earthquake resilient buildings are to mitigate the risk and the seismic design of buildings under Nepal National Building Code has been revised and enhanced the regulatory requirements for a new building. On the other hand, the trend of new building structure after the 2015 earthquake has shifted from masonry construction to reinforced concrete (RC) structure, under which trend a construction frequently got different from its design drawings due to lack of awareness and knowledge regarding legal compliance among the building owners and contractors. There are identified issues in the design and building inspection capacity of municipalities, building supervision capacity of architectural engineers, building quality control capacity of contractors, and awareness-raising of related parties.

Considering the above situation, the project aims to establish a mechanism of building code compliance for safer building construction against earthquakes and develops a model building construction working procedure to disseminate toward municipalities and stakeholders through trainings.