SDG 4: Help All Children Access Education in Nepal

Dear Supporter,

Towards the end of last year, we launched our new Women’s Empowerment Program in Nepal.

In Nepal, women are born into a society where their rights are subordinate to those of men. Girls are often married off at an early age with little or no education, land rights or independent income options available to them. Our initiatives in Nepal, hope to turn the tide against gender discrimination by empowering local girls and women through gender equality and alternative income workshops, educating them on a variety of health topics and providing educational centers where they have the chance to further their education by becoming literate or providing additional educational support for young girls currently enrolled in local schools.

Since the program’s inception, the project as gone from strength to strength. We were fortunate enough to have a female Hindi speaking gynecologist join us who did a fantastic job delivering women’s health seminars to the mothers of the Conversation Club kids and women of Male Patan. Both sessions reached attendance levels well over expectations highlighting the need and want for these type of talks in the local community. The talks covered topics ranging from female reproductive health, contraception, and female anatomy as well as answering lots of questions from the women. There was lots of laughing during the sessions and the women all seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves. We hope to offer more of these sessions to the women in the future with particular focus on female reproductive health.

Over the last two months, we have also started running free English lessons to the women of Male Patan. Every week we have new students who are all so eager to learn and develop their conversational skills. Our volunteers always have a great time working with the women who have a brilliant sense of humor. We do lots of different activities with the women from role-play to interactive games and also just chatting over a cup of tea practicing conversational English. It has been beautiful to watch the women’s skills grow in such a short amount of time and in turn to see their confidence grow. It has been amazing seeing the impact we have been able to achieve in such a short amount of time so it is very exciting to look towards the future of the program.

We also had one of the volunteers run our first ever art class for the women of Pokhara. It was a huge success and was followed up the next week with another very successful turnout. The women were all very proud of their final results.

Other topics we hope to offer in the future as part our women’s empowerment program include business development, financial skills, computer skills, more health seminars, craft seminars and anywhere the program takes us! It is exciting to see the potential of the program and we look forward to seeing it develop to cater for the local community’s needs and interests. 

Thank you for your continued support.

All the best

GVI Nepal

Links:

• www.gvi.org