
Hi,
We spent the last couple of days with Women's Awareness Center Nepal (Nari Chetna Kendra to locals). It was cool to visit with them after seeing ASHA's work because it was almost like fast-forwarding 10 years.
WACN started off in 1991 helping build informal savings and credit groups similar to the ones I visited in Okarpauwa. Over time they have helped the groups come together to form 36 larger, more powerful cooperatives ranging from 200 to 865 members each. These are formal legal institutions, giving them more structure and staying power. Most of the cooperatives function completely independently of WACN at this point, with their own local staff and offices. It's a great model, as they don't depend on NGOs or international donors to grow.
Together, WACN's cooperatives have over $2.5 million dollars of capital in circulation. They use this money for the typical loans I mentioned before - sustainable agriculture, buffalo rearing, opening small shops, sending kids to school, etc. But the structure of the cooperative also allows women to come together around a myriad of other issues. One cooperative we visited in Kavre grew so powerful that they took over the local 'forest users group' - the committee of locals who work with the government to manage the forest. When a group of wealthy landowners appropriated the forest for their own use, the women rose up in protest. The leaders of the cooperative were arrested, but they convinced the police of their cause and were immediately released, at which point they marched to the local government office to protest. They filed two lawsuits and eventually prevailed, saving the forest from destruction.
We spent most of our visit at individual members' homes, seeing how their lives have improved due to their involvement with their local coop. My favorite visit was with a woman who doesn't have enough land to grow food. She eventually built up enough loan capital to buy 4 buffalo, and now sells hundreds of liters of buffalo milk per day (we drank some hot milk in tall glasses - delicious!). She makes even more money selling the manure, and has enough left over to run her own mini-biogas plant. This contraption, built with training and technical support from WACN, converts the methane from the manure into fuel, which is piped into her home to power a gas burner. Awesome!
Well, I would love to tell you more stories, but I’ve got to run... I'm off to the airport to catch a flight to Bangladesh to visit with more groups there. I don't know how much Internet access I'll have there so don't be surprised if it's a while until you hear from me.
Namaskar,
Yael
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