Literacy and Livelihoods for 445 Women in Nepal

We have just returned from a project evaluation trip to Dang, where our community motivator, Ms. Parvati Chaudhary, and I visited women-led community groups in five villages. We were encouraged by the transformation we saw in the women, and the progress made by the communities - the progress you have made possible through your contributions. I want to hare some highlights with you:

Highlights

The 178 women in these groups are taking the lead in making positive changes to their communities and advocating for change. One group plans to build an easily accessible Learning Centre in the centre of the village to enable young mothers to participate in the adult literacy classes and activities held there.

Listening to the hopes and ideas of women for surrounding villages - with the change that we have already witnessed in just five villages, the collective effort of women, district-wide would be unstoppable!

28 Tharu women were provided with goats through the community groups. The rise in confidence from contributing economically to their households was… we look forward to seeing this change multiplied in the women who are gifted the goat’s offspring in the future.

Visiting our partner NGO’s new office: The local government donated land and resources to strengthen Help Society Nepal’s capacity and presence in Dang - this a huge accomplishment and the government’s recognition of their hard work and effectiveness as a local organization is extremely encouraging.

Challenges

Saying, “Not yet” to the women from villages we don’t currently work in. Systemic change only comes from the collective power of committed individuals - until our work reaches all the villages in the district, we cannot effect the regional change we’ve been working towards for the past decade. Women from the surrounding villages are asking for us to work with them as well. It’s very difficult for us to say, "Not yet" this as we would like to partner with them but that would require additional funding. 

Please consider if you could make a contribution to enable additional women led groups to be established and trained. It costs US$ 1,350 to establish and support one women group per year.

The women’s group that is building a new resource that would make it possible for young mothers to attend literacy classes close to home requested our help to buy 120 tin sheets for the roof and support truss. It costs US$ 1,470 to buy the construction materials. One tin trunk library is for their resource centre (books need to be kept in a tin-box to prevent mice from nibbling the pages) for their library. One good tin trunk library would cost US$ 480.

Thank you for your continued support to these women communities in Nepal. Please continue to check our website, http://www.ldcnepal.org/ for updates on our progress, and share the link with friends and family.

On 12-13^th Oct 2010 we were able train 56 Tharu women from two women led community support groups. Our focus for this training was to strengthen their office skills, review issues that affect each community and enable them to make stronger links with other organizations. Help Society Nepal members Mrs. Saraswati GC and Mr. Bhauna Chaudhary facilitated the training.

Each group now has constructed their own building in the community, close to their homes and one group is able to rent out one of the rooms to a local businessman that provides income to cover the group’s overhead costs.

At the end of the training each group made a six month plan that included working with us to implement the Get-One-Give-One" female goat gift program.

The topics covered in these trainings included:

 Group Management: 

• Effective planning for their groups and their own communities.
• How to keep good minutes of meetings and basic filing systems

Saving and Credit:

• Maintaining records of personal and group saving accounts
• Small loan management for their saving and credit groups and interest calculations.
• Accountability

Community:

• Improved farming for increased productions and livelihoods
• The importance of good nutrition for their families
• Taking care of the local environment
• Managing the Get-one-give-one Goat program
• Effective ways to care and for each member of the community
• Women and girls and family issues
• Looking at our values

Partnerships:

• Writing to local government service organisations
• How to write a small proposal and progress reports

Looking forward

Exposure Visits:

We would like to take each of these groups to visit outside of Dang district as their request to visit established community groups, so they can see what they did and how they tackled community issues.  Meeting with other groups is important as it creates a space to share their success stories and concerns.

Staffing:

Funding  ($125 per month) for one dedicated community support staff member would enable us to provide in depth support to each community support group the project works with.

Please do continue to check our website. http://www.ldcnepal.org/ for updates on our progress, and share the link with friends and family who you think might be interested. Thank you again for your continued support to the women in Nepal.