Disaster Relief for Nepal's Vulnerable Children

The Global Fund for Children would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project "Disaster Relief for Nepal's Vulnerable Children." We are proud to announce that thanks to your support, we have now reached our goal of $6,000! Below is a glimpse into what our grassroots partners have been working on since our last report, as well as information on how they will be helping their communities moving forward:

The Global Fund for Children was founded on a commitment to support local solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing children by partnering with grassroots organizations around the world. As pillars of their communities, our grassroots partners in Nepal have stepped up to help their neighbors recover in the aftermath of April’s earthquakes. Over the past several months, they have readily adapted to their communities’ changing and growing needs by expanding their current programs and coordinating additional support. Now that many of the initial relief efforts have come to a close, our partners are helping their communities rebuild and overcome the long-term challenges brought on by the earthquakes. 

The earthquakes caused severe structural damage to schools across the region, and many of the children that our Nepalese grassroots partners serve have had inadequate access to educational services since April. To keep their students safe, many damaged schools have been forced to conduct classes elsewhere, meeting in low-resource, temporary learning centers that are often crowded and noisy. In order to address this problem, our grassroots partner Partnership for Sustainable Development (PSD) Nepal has begun supporting the reconstruction of six rural schools that were damaged by the earthquakes. In the coming months, PSD Nepal hopes to begin construction on another four schools that the organization has identified as being in need of its services. 

Additionally, our grassroots partners continue to address the health and safety issues of the children they serve through a number of different workshops. Our partner Gentle Heart Foundation has begun offering health and hygiene awareness classes to help earthquake survivors maintain cleanliness with limited resources. In the coming months, Gentle Heart Foundation plans to compile and distribute kits for people in the Chitwan district in order to provide them with basic health and hygiene supplies. PSD Nepal is currently offering workshops to children to help them understand how their bodies respond to stress, and to provide them with coping skills to deal with the emotional trauma they have experienced. 

In the coming year, The Global Fund for Children will invite its Nepalese and other South Asian grassroots partners to participate in a regional GFC Knowledge Exchange—a multi-day workshop during which GFC grassroots partners gather to learn from their peers and from experts in community and international development.  This Knowledge Exchange will focus on the issues of rehabilitation and social reintegration of vulnerable children. Grassroots partners will share lessons learned from their recovery efforts, learn from experts in the field of disaster recovery, and begin the process of long-term planning to help create more resilient communities.

It’s been nearly five months since the Gorkha earthquake and its aftershocks shook Nepal and disrupted the lives of millions of individuals throughout the country. Our grassroots partners in and around Kathmandu experienced the effects firsthand, as these disasters inflicted structural damage on the buildings in which our partners’ programs operate and caused emotional distress for the already vulnerable children they serve.

But with your support, The Global Fund for Children has helped its partners meet the immediate needs of their communities and is providing ongoing assistance in helping them plan for and fund their next stages of recovery. Within weeks of the initial earthquake, we mobilized financial support from our Emergency Fund, enabling our Nepalese partners to provide basic necessities such as food, water, and temporary shelter to the children and families in their communities.

With this support, our partner PSD Nepal organized health camps in the Nuwakot, Sindhupalchowk, and Dolakha districts, providing medical care and professional psychological counseling to 700 individuals. The organization has also supplemented its programming with safety education, including an awareness class that teaches children how to stay safe during and after earthquakes, and the distribution of a children’s book entitled Gita and Shyam: The Day When the Earth Shook, which discusses earthquakes and their effects in child-friendly language. Another partner, CAP Nepal, has been offering psychological counseling, including art and group therapy sessions, to children who have suffered trauma as a result of the earthquake. CAP Nepal conducts many of these sessions at mobile camps where thousands of people are living outside due to the destruction of their homes.

Over the next two to three years, The Global Fund for Children will provide its grassroots partners in Nepal with funding and technical expertise to support their medium- and long-term recovery efforts. Throughout this time, we will continue to support these organizations’ core programming activities and organizational priorities in accordance with our model of offering flexible cash grants that enable our partners to invest in vital infrastructure and capacity-building developments.

On behalf of everyone at The Global Fund for Children, thank you for your support at this critical time in the lives of our grassroots partners in Nepal and the children they serve. Together, we are helping these children and their communities become more resilient in the face of natural disasters and beyond.