In celebration of "National Ride Your Bike to School Day" your donations will enable us to teach 24 more children at Kushadevi School to ride a bike! In rural Nepal, children from marginalised communities do not readily have access to transport of any kind. Our Ride for Life programme includes a bike lending scheme, learning mechanics workshops, riding skills and road safety workshops. The bikes are also used for topic based learning and new inventions for our budding entrepreneurs!
Growing up in Nepal can be very challenging both at home and at school. Home life is often turbulent, with 82% of our students experiencing domestic abuse, 94% work up to 6 hours each day outside of school, sometimes in hazardous child labour. Some live or work nearly 4 hours walk away from school. It is not a surprise therefore that regular attendance is sometimes as low as 42%. In some areas of rural Nepal we have learned that Bicycles can make a massive impact supporting children into school.
Learning to ride a bike increases the social standing of children in rural communities, especially those from marginalised ethnic groups. Children learn to safely ride in our workshops, and then loan a bike to use to get to school every day. For 132 young riders, this has now halved journey times to school and contributed to attendance rising by 23% in 2016. Parents show increased interest in education, actively encouraging children into school, a first at Kushadevi. These wheels change lives.
Our previous similar projects show we can achieve magnificent results with our holistic approach, including Ride for Life: School attendance registers show an increase in Primary age attendance; on average up by 23.2% from 2014 to 2016, The girls drop-out rate has decreased from an average of 21.7% for over 12s, to 9% in 2016. 92% of students state that they feel more confident since participating in our project work and that they have improved access to education and increased self-esteem.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
