"Support-A-Child" Help Child Go To School & Study

On the 11^th-13^th April 2014 ECCA organized 3^rd National Conference of Children’s Clubs in Kathmandu. The conference brought together 116 children from schools in 20 districts (out of 75 districts) of Nepal.

During the conference, students from different nature clubs were given the opportunity to participate in the Knowledge Marketplace, a funding competition in which students could present a proposal for the improvement of their school or wider community. Their proposals were presented to a panel of experts, who carefully selected six nature clubs to be awarded funding to help implement their proposed projects.

Students from Lalit Kalyan Kendra Lower Secondary School in Lalitpur, Kathmandu (who were assisted by the Support a Child campaign), were successful in achieving funding for their school. Their proposal was to install water taps in their school. The school is government run, and previously only had access to unclean water from a well. With the help of ECCA, however, the school has installed a tank and water is disinfected using WATASOL chlorine solution.  Currently there is only one tap in the school which the students and teachers can use to access safe drinking water, which means that students have to spend a lot of their time queuing to use the tap, often when it is very hot outside. The funding grant which the students received will therefore be used to install three more water taps in the school, allowing students to access clean water more easily.

Bimala Tamang, 14, and Dhiroj Khadka, 13, were sponsored by the Support a Child campaign to attend the conference in order to present their proposal for installing the water taps in their school. Bimala explained that these taps will make a huge difference to the students in the school, and that it is also important in supporting the clean drinking water activities that the school is involved in, such as producing WATASOL chlorine solution from the WATA electro-chlorinator device.

“We feel very proud to have won the award”, Dhiroj explained. “Our school will have a good reputation in our community because of it”. This award will help to attract prestige to this government school, which struggles to maintain enrollment due to local students’ preference to attend private schools. Students come to this school from outside of Kathmandu and may not attend for more than a few months due to their parents being forced to relocate for work. This is disruptive to the students’ education; good publicity is therefore extremely valuable for attracting local students to the school.

The project to install the taps will be completed in a month, and after this the students at Lalit Kalyan Kendra Lower Secondary School will have easier access to safe drinking water.

Thank you for your continued support, without which we could not support these students to achieve funding for their school. Your generous donations are extremely valued.

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Thank you & Regards,

Angel Chitrakar

Senior Program Officer

ECCA