Education

The Himalayan Leaky Foundation supports women and conducts education and training for their self-sufficiency and empowerment. Skills training enables these women to look after themselves and their families and to provide income to look after their children. HLF has been running adult literacy classes so these women are able to read and write the basic things.

The problem is huge. Every year as many as 20,000 girls from the poorest parts of rural Nepal are trafficked. They and their families are tricked with false promises of good jobs, education, or lured by proposals of marriage from handsome strangers. They end up in brothels, or in homes and factories as slaves, or forced into child marriage, their young lives cut short by trauma and abuse.

How can this happen? Grinding poverty, caste discrimination, and the belief that women have little value; a girl is an extra mouth to feed until she is married off. If she can leave home to earn money for the whanau they may be too desperate to look closely at what her fate might really be.

How can we stop it? The Himalayan Leaky Foundation goes into villages, finds the girls most at risk and puts them into school and keeping them there so they are safe. We also educate the girls and the whanau about the realities and dangers of trafficking and early marriage and weave a protective web of trusted people around the girls, so they can reach out if trouble does arise. The border between Nepal and India is unmonitored; people are able to move easily between the countries without showing necessary papers. This creates an easy avenue for traffickers to smuggle women and children from Nepal to be sold into sex slavery in India. HLF has border stations monitoring the Nepalese-Indian crossing, each cautiously observing and suspicious activity that might suggest a women or child is being trafficked.

We hold trafficking awareness seminars, educating youth in villages and creating awareness of the tools traffickers will use. This is having a positive impact within communities we are working with; applied knowledge is power!

The adult literacy classes for women are going really well. Three of the women have been able to secure jobs following their ability to now read and write the basics and sign their names. It’s a sense of empowerment that we take for granted in the western world, but means the world of difference to women in this community. Another amazing by-product of holding these classes is it enables women a safe space to talk about issues affecting them and their whanau. I was lucky to meet one of our class regulars, a woman who has escaped a violent home because of the support offered to her by Himalayan Leaky Foundation. Hearing the experience of another woman gave her the confidence to leave her own situation.

The adult literacy classes for women are going really well. Three of the women have been able to secure jobs following their ability to now read and write the basics and sign their names. It’s a sense of empowerment that we take for granted in the western world, but means the world of difference to women in this community. Another amazing by-product of holding these classes is it enables women a safe space to talk about issues affecting them and their whanau. I was lucky to meet one of our class regulars, a woman who has escaped a violent home because of the support offered to her by Himalayan Leaky Foundation. Hearing the experience of another woman gave her the confidence to leave her own situation.