The program in details : 

 

Since the summer of 2016, Solibad has decided to help Nepalese schoolchildren, following the appeal of Philippe Reynaert, who is very involved with the youth school of the EBPS Paris 12 club, and who had previously visited this particularly endearing country. We had helped him to collect bad material in the summer of 2015. In 2016, part of the team traveled to validate the project, which will eventually split into two separate programs.

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The Scool Ananda Bharaib de Mulpani

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About ten kilometers from the capital, Kathmandu, in a small village lost in the middle of rice fields, a public school welcomes 600 students, mostly girls, from 6 to 15 years old. We met the director of this school, Krishna Neupane, who was a teacher there for 10 years before becoming its director for 8 years. He is very attached to his school, where his wife also teaches. He opened the doors of his office to us and then the school, where we played an improvised game of badminton with the children on our first visit.

 

Krishna explained to us how schooling works in the "rural" regions of Nepal: young girls do not systematically go to school and are often "requisitioned" by their families to help - in the fields, or other work. The country has therefore put in place a national policy to help schoolgirls find their way back to school: the 360 girls at the Ananda Bhairab school receive a "scholarship" of 400 rupees per year and per student. That's about... 4 euros... This just enables the school to pay for the paper for the year.... Another scholarship system has been set up by this director: two local associations including the Rotary Club help them and have donated 4000 rupees (45 euros) to the school to finance the scholarships of 20 students over one year. The scholarships are distributed on the basis of academic merits, but also financial resources of the family, who must apply. It is a commission within the school that evaluates the applications and decides which applications should be given priority.

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The Solibad team had a long discussion with the students, and we visited the houses of two of the students benefiting from the scholarships - they live in permanent houses, certainly, and in the middle of the rice fields, but 4 of them live in one room for one, or 6 in 2 rooms (kitchen included) for the other, in very Spartan conditions: impossible to do their homework, they have to take care of the siblings, help in the fields, etc.

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On our return, we therefore set up a scholarship system, similar to the framework already predefined by the school and under the same conditions of attribution to the young students, by proposing to our partner clubs, in France or abroad, to finance these scholarships, over a period of 2 years at least (that is 45€ per year, so 90€ for two years). We have already completed the first two sponsorship campaigns for 31 young girls, and will no doubt continue with others in the near future.

 

The scholarship, which Solibad will receive at the beginning of the year, will be sent directly to the school and will be the only annual expense for the club.

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The School Nachya Pauwa Primary School

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In parallel with this action, which starts at the beginning of the new school year, we have begun working with a local NGO, Sahara Foundation, for the second part of our action in Nepal: aid for the reconstruction of a school.

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This project is financially heavier, with a greater investment in the first year to redo the "walls", and then simply to cover the equipment needs. We are currently evaluating the feasibility and costs of rebuilding a school located 45 minutes from Kathmandu, in a part of the valley that was hit hard by the earthquake. The Nachya Pauwa Primary School was two thirds destroyed, with an entire building housing 4 classrooms completely destroyed. Some of the village's schoolchildren were forced to take a long walk to go elsewhere, but most are now out of school, in an extremely poor environment, where the vast majority of parents have left the village to work in the Gulf States, leaving their children in the care of grandparents. The main activity of the village is the production of local alcohol, which is particularly strong and which the children are confronted with from a very young age. The Tamang community that occupies this village is one of the lowest castes in Nepal (it works a bit like in India), which does not help the ease of integration of the young people.

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Our project is - via the Sahara Foundation, in permanent contact with the elected representatives of the community - to help rebuild the school, and in a second phase, to set up classes to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol and healthy living, nutrition classes, etc...

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This project is still under development, it has fallen behind with the health crisis of 2020. We will keep you informed as soon as we know more about the costs of rebuilding the school and how to implement this action.