In the Far-west of Nepal, life chances of girls are threatened by poverty, lack of access to quality education, restrictive socio-cultural norms around girls' roles, responsibilities and capacities, and limited employment opportunities for them to transition into from school. All this makes early marriage, pregnancy, and capped personal development a reality for many. Mercy Corps with its local partner FAYA Nepal, under UKAID's Girls Education Challenge program, has been working for the last two years to change this situation in Kailali district. The program is implemented through 38 projects in 18 countries globally.As Supporting the Education of Marginalized Girls (STEMS) Girls in Kailali draws to a close in 2016, it has been able to achieve marked differences to the lives of girls and young women in Kailali, both in and out of school.
Working at the parental and community level, its extensive and continuous EGAP (Educate Girls, Alleviate Poverty) campaign has managed to effect tangible changes in parents' perspectives on, as well as their ability to finance, girls' education. As part of the EGAP campaign, since the start of 2014, program staff have supported the DEO by distributing information on government scholarships and by the mid-point of the program in August 2015, take up of these scholarships in STEM schools had reached an impressive 93 percent compared to non-project schools in Kailali where scholarship take up was 73 percent.
The program also put in place girls clubs in schools to focus on the top fail subjects—Science, Math and English—along with STEM's own bespoke Life Skills and Sexual and Reproductive Health curricula. Working with teachers from project schools so as to promote positive teaching practices into the longer term, these after-school clubs provided a safe space for girls to network, review and reinforce their learning from the classroom. In rural Nepal girls' attendance often drops during agricultural and festival seasons, and simply because they often arrive at school late or tired due to their work burdens.
Special versions of these clubs were also made available to girls who had failed up to two subjects in their SLC and were eligible to take the supplementary exams, adding Nepali and Social Studies to the subjects on offer, and also to out-of-school girls who had dropped out over the past six academic years. The girls attending STEM's SLC revision clubs achieved an 86 percent pass rate in 2014, but by 2015 this figure had climbed up to 89 percent. Girls in the district who did not attend the clubs achieved a 77 percent pass rate in both years; a 12 percent advantage at the last round. The success owes to commitment and perseverance of the girls themselves, the teachers who were fully committed to the clubs.
Offered at various clusters around the program's implementation area, free of charge to the user and deliberately kept as a low cost provision to improve chances of sustainability if taken up by the DoE, the program has been able to tackle time and economic poverty, as well as other barriers to girls' education such as poor mobility and investment in girls due to restrictive gendered socio-cultural norms and practices.
Simply put, poorer parents have been more inclined to allow their daughters to attend these clubs, and girls have been able to negotiate their attendance far more easily.
Another innovative intervention STEM has put in place is a Girls' Transition Fund (GTF), which is a revolving fund managed by four Savings and Credit Cooperatives in Kailali. Girls—typically discriminated against in financial service provision due to the expectation that they will marry, move away, and default on their repayments—are able to take loans of between Rs 100,000 and 250,000 at a negotiated low rate of only eight percent to set up or expand existing businesses.
Evidence so far strongly suggests that not only are girls able to repay their loans on time, but that they are running profitable businesses, gaining financial independence and a higher degree of self-confidence, and household and community respect, thereby experiencing empowerment on multiple levels.
Urmila, a STEM girl from an ex-Kamaiya family took a GTF loan in 2015 to set up an auto-rickshaw business. She now earns Rs 1,500 a day, has almost finished paying back her loan, has saved Rs 45,000 in her bank account, and is also paying for her elder brother's plus two education. Urmila says, "I was living at home with an incomplete education and working for 200 rupees a day as a laborer. I was frustrated and wanted to learn some skills. The support I have got in the past months has changed my life. I'm self reliant, and I support my family."
STEM intends to produce a study reviewing the overall impact of the GTF on girls and their contributions to the local economy as well as their families, and hopes to promote the model to financial service providers including the Ministry of Finance and Central Bank to go some way in transforming the financial service landscape for girls in Nepal, and through this, improve girls' social status and life chances. The program also plans to share Girls' Club modality with the Ministry of Education to advocate for broader take up of this initiative.
The author is STEM Program Manager at Mercy Corps Nepal
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