By Surendra Pariyar | Project Leader/ Exe. Director
The EduCare Project is an innovative, unique, pragmatic and efficient new approach to support the helpless and the most vulnerable.
‘EduCare’ stands for Education, Healthcare, Food, Clothing, Hygiene, Counseling and Assistance & Protection whenever this is needed.
Poverty in Nepal:
According to statistics 75% of Nepal’s population, around 20 million people live in the villages. There are thousands of poverty –stricken villages with millions of people without any access to Hospitals, Schools and scarcity of drinking water. Many of these villages are only accessible by walking. Those children who are attending school often have to walk for two hours or more to reach the school, many of them barefoot.
Poor people have relatively simple needs, but those that we are targeting, destitute single mothers with dependent daughters, don’t even have the most basic requirements met.
It is exactly in this environment that “the traffickers and the organized flesh-trade” are most active and most successful.
According to surveys the number of girls and young women who are victims of trafficking has risen dramatically after the two devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal in 2015.
What We do
With this project we are targeting the “helpless”! Those who most need help are utterly poor, uneducated and rurally based. We are focusing on families that are headed by single Mother’s or Grandmother’s where the father died or left to never return. Some of these families are including boys ,in a family with three daughters and one son for example. In this case the exception is confirming the rule, since our declared objective is and will remain “the prevention of worst forms of abuse, discrimination and the trafficking of girls.
These families have a home to stay, however basic this might be, a rickety hut, a makeshift shanty, but their mothers are lacking the means to provide them with education, nutritious food, hygiene, healthcare and appropriate clothing.
The best of all aid to give is intellectual aid - Education!! A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to material things because material things can make them dependent, but the gift of knowledge will set them free, empower them!!! This is why education and vocational training in due time is our priority!
We are enrolling the beneficiaries in school; provide school-uniforms, shoes, books and stationary. According to the needs of each family we are providing staple food such as Rice, Pulses, Potatoes and oil. In the case of illness we are providing medical care, medicine and hospitalization if needed so.
Most of these families are dwelling in remote and difficult to access villages. Once a month we will visit these families and we deliver the monthly food, accompanied by our nurse who will provide a check-up for all family members. Moreover, she will counsel them on nutritious diet and proper hygiene. To this end we are providing soap, shampoo, toothpaste, sanitary-pads and underwear.
Clothes and warm blankets are provided according to the season and in the case of any emergency these families can contact us anytime and we will undertake what is necessary to assist them.
Furthermore and wherever possible we are building an “Improved-Cooking-Stove” to assure safe, economic and smoke free cooking.(read more under “improved cooking-stove”)
We are not providing any money/cash to these families and this in order to prevent abuse/misuse and total dependence. The mothers have to continue to work and help to provide for their daily needs.
Currently, March 2019, we are supporting a total of 100 beneficiaries (20 Educare Families) and we are seeing excellent results; all of them have enormously improved. We hope to increase this number to 25 families by the end of this year.
Despite progress over the last decade, girls and women remain the majority of Nepal’s unhealthy, unfed, uneducated, exploited, abused and stunted! We are determined and committed to change this sad and intolerable truth!
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