Discriminatory citizenship provision against women in Nepal has limited women’s ability to make economic decisions in a variety of ways, which can have far-reaching consequences, said a report. The new constitution, promulgated this week, has a discriminatory citizenship provision which prevents women married to foreign nationals from passing on citizenship to their children. ‘Women, Business and the Law 2016’, a report launched by World Bank earlier this week, pointed out that gender-discriminatory law regarding citizenship and said the constraint in women’s ability to make economic decisions can have far-reaching consequences. “A mother not being to pass on citizenship to her child solely curtails the right of both the mother and the child.

Similarly, there are no provisions about how foreigner husband of a Nepali woman will sustain while he waits for 15 years to get citizenship making it impractical for him to stay and sustain in the country,” said Sapana Pradhan Malla, an advocate. As per the report, empowering women legally may have similar effects to empowering them politically, allowing them to better reflect their preferences in decision-making. The report, published every two years, has examined laws that impede women’s employment and entrepreneurship in 173 economies and states that women in South Asia continue to trail their peers in many other parts of the world as discriminatory laws thwart their economic advancement.

Restriction to work in mines and laws which make it mandatory for a married woman to include their husband’s name, nationality, and address, in order to register her business, are other gender-discriminatory provisions prevalent in other South Asian Countries. The report has also stated that ninety per cent of the economies that were measured had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities. It has measured how laws, regulations and institutions differentiate between women and men in ways that may affect women’s incentives or capacity to work or set up and operate a business.