This report presents the Nepal focused findings of a study which assessed the institutional arrangements, key stakeholders, legal provisions, coordination and linkage mechanisms, and four key elements of early warning systems – risk knowledge, monitoring and warning services, dissemination and communication, and response capacity – from the perspective of gender. It also gathered experiences from two villages with functioning community-based flood early warning systems. The report suggests that, in view of the diversity of development issues and livelihood challenges that communities face on a day-to-day basis, it is important to tune early warning systems according to the local context. It is argued that early warning systems should be seen as a social and development activity rather than an exclusive domain of engineers and technicians. This simplification and democratization of early warning systems requires bridging the gap between technical departments and communities.