Gender Equality Nepal Project #1649

Rescuing Young Girls From Bonded Labor in Nepal

by Nepal Youth Foundation (NYF)

Project Report | Dec 7, 2007
An Entire Valley of Girls Freed At Last!!!

By Janis Olson | Executive Director

Close up of school girl newly rescued!

This year NYOF will accomplish the first stage in our long term goal of completely eradicating the practice of young Nepali girls being sold into slavery by their families. We first began this program in the year 2000 when we were able to rescue 32 girls. The number of girls saved has grown to over 3,400. We would not have been able to achieve this goal without the support of our donor community. Their response to our need has been amazing!

By the end of January 2008, NYOF will have completely eliminated this practice in the Dang Valley. We will have rescued every girl that was going to be sold into bonded servitude. We are now able to move on to an adjoining valley and continue our goal of rescuing the 20,000 to 25,000 girls sold yearly into bonded servitude. NYOF wants to achieve this goal by the year 2010.

During mid-January the labor contractors descend on the villages in Nepal. They convince the families to sell their daughters (some as young as six) for approximately $40 or $50. The girls receive nothing, and are sent off to far away places. The families lose all contact. The girls work from dawn to dusk. None of these children receive an education. Many never return home. The situation is tailor made for abuse.

NYOF convinces the families to keep their daughters at home. We give the families a piglet or goat that they can raise on food scraps and sell for more money than they would have received for their daughters. NYOF sends these girls to school and pays all of their expenses. NYOF enlarges the classrooms, instructs the teachers, pays for all supplies, uniforms, books, and even provides kerosene lamps so the girls may study at night as there is no electricity.

NYOF will not be able to achieve its long term goal without our continued donor support. It only costs $100 to rescue a girl from bonded servitude. We hope you will join us in this worthwhile effort.

Picture of another girl newly rescued

Girls saved from bonded servitude

Links:

Permalink

Jun 8, 2007
Update-- Indentured Daughters Program

By Olga Murray | Project leader

The goal of this project is to rescue from bonded servitude young girls in Nepal who are more or less “sold” by their parents to work as servants in the homes of strangers far away from their villages.

Our “modus operandi” was to avoid giving money to the parents because alcoholism is rife in the area. Instead, if the father would agree to leave his daughter at home or to recall her from her labors, we provided the family with a piglet or a goat, which they could raise on kitchen scraps and sell at the end of the year for about the same sum as it received for the child’s labor. Or more, if the animal was bred. Simultaneously, we placed the girl in school at our own expense and enrolled her mother in an income generation program. By this means, we hope that within three or four years the mother can earn enough to pay her daughter’s own school expenses.

The program has been phenomenally successful. From its inception in January 2000, when 32 girls were rescued, NYOF has now returned more than 1300 girls home to live with their families and attend school in our target area. Indeed, we are responsible for the rescue of 2500 young girls – last year, an INGO with much larger resources offered to help us, and after we trained them in our methods, they rescued 1200 girls in a single year.

We have now more or less defeated the practice in the area where we have been working for the last six years and have moved on to an adjoining locality where the practice is common. In January 2006, we enrolled 500 new girls in the program in this new location.

Simultaneously, we began our energetic awareness program to turn the community against the practice. Our success is due substantially to these efforts. We initiated many methods to inform the community about the inhumaneness and illegality of what was a commonly accepted practice. The girls returned home by NYOF wrote street plays, which they acted out in the villages, describing their suffering while they were indentured. We bought time weekly on a local radio station for a program in which the returned girls talked about their experiences as bonded laborers, initiated a broad poster and leaflet campaign, formed the girls and the adults in the community into clubs to oppose the practice, and filed lawsuits against those who employed bonded girls. By this means, the villagers in our target area were turned against the bonding custom. Whereas in prior years, hundreds of girls were sent off every year, to our knowledge, not a single girl in our target area went off to work last year.

We have initiated our awareness campaign in the adjoining locality. Our aim is to bring a few hundred girls home from their labors, start our effective awareness campaign, and then to invite an INGO with larger resources to finish the job. It is estimated that 20,000 to 25,000 young girls of the Tharu ethnic group are subject to this practice in five western districts of Nepal. We have an ambitious goal – to eliminate the practice by 2010, with the help of other INGOs.

You can also click below to read the NYOF spring newsletter!

Attachments:

NYOF Spring Newsletter (PDF)

1 Attachment

Permalink

‹ 1 2

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.