Women at Work in Rural Nepal

Friends and Family,

Last month marked a big change for Marpha Foundation. After four years of service to the Marpha Foundation NGO, it was unanimously decided by our NGO committee, committee advisors, and parents of the kindergarten to change the current NGO committee members.

The goal was to include more kindergarten families in the governance of the Kindergarten. The logic was simple. The main beneficiaries of the kindergarten should be directly involved in its governance. Now, five members, over 71% of the committee, are kindergarten parents. The two members who are not parents are representatives of two important village groups—Dhurba belongs to Marpha’s Youth Club, and Poosmaya belongs to Marpha’s Elder Mothers Group. It is also significant to note that 57% percent of members on the committee are women and 43% are Dalit, a marginalized group within Marpha and the whole of Nepal.

The new committee’s first job was to discuss salary raises for all the lead kindergarten teachers. This required quite a bit of reflection and planning and important questions emerged: when should raises occur in the future and where will the money come from?

The committee discussed possible timelines for raises as well as the need for a rubric to determine how much an individual teacher receives. The latter brought up a more complicated set of concerns regarding how to create a system of accountability for teachers as well as guidelines to help the committee and all kindergarten families to support the teachers’ well-being and continued professional growth in relevant and meaningful ways. Realizing these deserve time and care in their consideration, the committee decided to work through these ideas over the next three monthly meetings towards creating healthy systems that we can implement in 2019.

The next issue on the table was where the money will come from. This question had an increased urgency because we weren’t simply talking about future raises, but the current raise, which brought salaries from 11,000Rs per month to 15,000Rs per month. That is a 36% percent increase that would have to come from somewhere. Realizing how dependent the Foundation already is on donations, the committee wanted to explore alternative ways to raise these funds locally, the truth being that despite how needed donations are, they are never guaranteed. The committee proposed brining this issue to all the kindergarten families to discuss.

Our new chairman Surakshya, who started by acknowledging how much the kindergarten has affected everyone’s lives for the better, led the meeting with the kindergarten families. He talked about how for the last three years village children have had a safe and love-filled space to learn that has also given parents the time to work. He also spoke to how affordable fees are and how little they actually covered of the true cost of running such a space. The highest fees are 1000Rs per month whereas the true cost of attending the kindergarten per student is 8500Rs. per month. “We need to increase salaries for our teachers and if we don’t find a way to generate these funds locally we will become that much more dependent on donations, which makes the future of this school tenuous at best. We don’t expect you to suddenly cover all the costs of the kindergarten, but we need to start taking more responsibility. Towards this, I ask, can we increase fees the amount it would take to give each of our valued teachers the raises they deserve?” Surakshya proposed an additional cost of 500Rs per month per child. With a show of hands all the families agreed.

This is small step towards financial security and a big step towards sustainability. Each time the community shows up, talks about issues, reflects on the implications of possible solutions, and takes a step together in a direction Marpha Foundation becomes that much more relevant, self-determined, and renewed.

We also want to take this opportunity to say that last month we reached and surpassed our 2018 fundraising goal of $15,000. We thank you, all of our donors, for bearing witness to our efforts from afar and for supporting with what you can. Every dollar helps keep local women employed, and every dollar buys us more time to author healthy systems of engagement as a community. We will be closing this campaign to think about our next steps in fundraising and how to involve all of you in our future. We will have more information for you in the Fall.

We thank you again from the depths of our hearts and with all the air in our lungs. Thank you.

Sending love from Marpha,

The Marpha Foundation community of learners