PROJECT UPDATES

Girls’ Empowerment Program

Our Girls’ Empowerment Program goes from strength to strength, reaching thousands of young women throughout Nepal.

REACH:
Since the beginning of our 2nd 3 year phase (beginning April 2021) we have reached over 8000 new young women via our peer mobilisation program, where our girls go out into more remote areas and teach. In total since the program began, we have directly reached 22,273 girls.

Whilst supervised; the girls pass on all that they have learned, from self defence to women’s rights, making sanitary towels, what to do in threatening situations, techniques to avoid cyber bullying, career guidance, avoiding child marriage and much much more. Additionally we have also continued to work with 4000 young women with whom we have previously worked.

From our printed books, flyers and billboards we have reached approximately 7800 individuals.

From community level training we have reached 900 new individuals, including boys, and adults.

Our national TV talk show is more popular than ever, the girls take on politicians, interview women’s rights activists and discuss issues facing women in Nepal today, with highly influential guests each episode.

We are averaging just under 100,000 viewers across the country each episode, this number is based on a TV in a home, when you factor in that most households have families of at least 5 people, then the number of viewers grows significantly.

It’s of huge testament to the girls’ work and courage that they are in a position to be a part of this show, 4 years ago they would never speak up in public or talk to a man, now they have their sights on becoming politicians and other change making professions.

SYSTEMATIC CHANGES

The local level government leaders and other stakeholders are now reached directly by our girls.

The girls frequently submit videos and petitions to local and national government to effect change in issues facing girls across the county, with great success

Because of provincial and federal level agreements stemming from our program, girls’ empowerment issues have been highlighted in provincial and federal government planning process.

Issues of sexual reproductive health and menstrual health rights are now being discussed in the community, schools in which we work and home as well. Something that was seriously taboo subjects before we began our work.

SCHOOLS & GIRL FRIENDLY TOILETS

We continue to work closely with schools to create girl friendly environments. It is very normal for girls to not attend school when they have their period. This is often due to embarrassment and lack of hygienic facilities.

We continue our efforts to end this, in this current phase we have built 4 more girl friendly toilets with available sanitary towels, pad incineration chambers and education of male and female teachers. These 4 toilet blocks have directly benefited 1845 girls.

FURTHER KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

Girls Learning Centre

Our Girl’s Learning Centre and Safe House remains on time and on budget. The community is extremely excited about the building and have offered to build a better road to and around the centre.

The girls from our Empowerment Program couldn’t be more excited about their new building and love learning about the construction process. They are also working out the best way for them to give a friendly welcome to new arrivals from around the country in need of help and support once the centre is open

As a secondary bonus the building is proving to be a real boost to the local community and economy with small business popping up to cater to the workers and also the construction itself if providing work to local skilled labourers in uncertain times.

Once construction is complete this building will serve 10’s of thousands of vulnerable young women for decades to come. It is a truly unique project that has only been made possible from your support of the Girls’ Empowerment Program and the amazing achievements of the girls; completely changing the local mindset towards young women.

Four years ago, before our program began, a building of this nature would have been impossible.

So thanks to Accuro, the lives of countless young women have changed for the better and the entire community and country as a whole will greatly benefit.

Nutrition Program

Our Nutrition program is now feeding lunch to over 2000 children a day across 30 schools, a meal they would otherwise go without.

A fantastic result of this is that attendance is growing as new students are arriving because of the meals, a prerequisite is that (on the whole) the kids need to spend the whole day at school to receive a meal.

We have opened one library program in each ward of Nepal, a resource centre for the community to learn about nutrition.

As well as having hundreds of local individuals in our project area working with us, we have also trained up hundreds of individuals from 35 districts coming from all of Nepal’s 7 provinces to be advocates and ambassadors for our program, taking our program to a national level.

We work very closely with Child Clubs, these are essentially locations where children in or out of education can attend to learn or seek refuge, via these clubs we are taking our program to a much larger audience as they exist all over Nepal. Along with our partners we have opened 2 more clubs this month serving 260 children in our program area.

This program kicked off in the thick of Covid Lockdown so we took a great deal of the lessons online. We are now however in full swing and working not only with children, but pregnant women and young mums, a demographic hugely susceptible to malnutrition and associated issues. There will be more detailed data to report on the young mums program in the next report.

We are reaching approximately 127500 people weekly from our nutrition information radio program and 5000+ per month through printed materials and social media.

Photos of the program in action:

 WITH MANY THANKS, AS ALWAYS