Freedom is only the first step of their journey and your help is needed more than ever. NYF is now helping thousands of these former child slaves move towards a brighter future by offering them education, counseling, job skills, advocacy training, and business micro-loans.
In rural Nepal, impoverished families traditionally sold their daughters into bonded servitude every year to supplement the family's scant income. Without the $50 to $70 they receive for their daughters' labor, some families couldn't afford the food to feed the remaining children at home. These girls were often taken far from their villages to work in distant cities. The children were typically forced to work long hours, mistreated and sometimes disappeared forever.
Since launching the program in 2000, NYF rescued 12,700 indentured girls and returned them to their families. Each family received a piglet or goat to replace the income from selling their daughter and promised to send their daughters to school. NYF now supports thousands of these girls through counseling, vocational training, legal support, small business loans, tutoring, scholarships and advocacy.
Not only have former bonded servants achieved personal freedom and dignity, they are creating lasting social change and future educational and professional opportunities for their sisters. The Nepal Youth Foundation trains these girls to speak out against bonding by effectively organizing themselves to perform street plays about the abuses they suffered, organize marches, create and distribute anti-slavery posters, host a radio show, and hold press conferences with international media.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
