Literacy and Livelihoods for 445 Women in Nepal

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.