NEPAL CASE STUDY
In April 2014, Women for Human Rights (WHR) accepted our invitation to collaborate on the idea our team had posted on OpenIDEO for the Amplify Women Safety Challenge.
DFA NYU idea was announced as a winning idea for funding in Summer 2014. With the funding, WHR was to pilot our idea in Tripureshwar, a slum in Kathmandu. Amplify invited DFA NYU team to travel to Nepal to work as design consultants with WHR in order to refine the idea using Human-Centered Design methods. Due to various reasons including the devastating earthquake in Nepal in April 2015, the pilot as well as our visit were delayed.
During the summer of 2015 we evolved the original plan with WHR contact, and the pilot eventually began in September 2015. A team of DFA NYU visited Nepal in January 2016.
WHR selected 36 women (called sahayogi saathis, which means a “helpful friend” in Nepali) living in Tripureshwar to participate to the program. The pilot started in September and included regular group meetings in order to understand the women’s needs, define the focus of the training, and build trust and self-confidence. The training was focused on sanitation and sexual health and gender-based violence (which had emerged as important areas) as well as self-presentations skills and leaderships. They also had an introduction session to micro-loans.
During our January trip, we were able to validate our core assumptions on the importance of being community-centered and the commitment of women in making the program self-sustaining. While women in the slum wanted to receive training to find financial opportunities, they also had a more holistic and longer term perspective and saw education as crucial to their empowerment.
“We want to thank DFA NYU for coming and spending this week with us. This is the first time that anyone came to listen to us and gives us a space to talk, and now our fear has decreased.“
Ambika, Sahayogi Saathi
During our trip, we were able to prototype a train-the-trainer session and find out that several women were interested in facilitating workshops in their community. The women went through another workshop focusing more on facilitation skills. Several of them will soon facilitate some workshops to women in their community.
Train-the-trainer model: a women from Tripureshwar facilitates a sexual health workshop with members of the Bhaktapur Youth Club.
DFA NYU trip to Nepal, January 2016
We also brainstormed on income-generation opportunities and women decided that they will do further research before making their final decision. The market research women did showed that the women’s original idea (making traditional wedding shoes) could be a viable option, but not one that all women wanted to pursue. They are currently still exploring options. In the meantime, they also received a more detailed training on micro-loans.
Prototyping with Legos to understand women’s expectations - DFA NYU trip to Nepal, January 2016
This pilot is still ongoing but so far it has been successful in nurturing a community among the 36 sahayogi saathis, in empowering them and in allowing them to start exploring income generation opportunities.
“Our participation in the program has changed our life. It had made us feel more confident, able to speak in public and realize the importance of education.” Sahayogi saathi
Pilot’s stakeholders:
The pilot is run by WHR (Women for Human Rights), an NGO based in Nepal, founded in 1994. WHR aims to empower single women economically, politically, socially and culturally in order to live dignified lives and enjoy the value of human rights. WHR has a long history of successfully empowering single women in Nepal: It has developed a thorough methodology to work with single women in rural areas and they are currently working with 1550 single women groups. WHR is becoming a role model for other international organizations.
Bhaktapur Youth Club (short name for Bhaktapur Youth Information Forum Library) is a group of young people (15-25 years old) created in 2001 in Bhaktapur (a city close to Kahtmandu) who teaches teenagers and women in low-income areas about sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Sahayogi Saathis Youth Club is composed of 15 members within Tripureshwar between 13 and 20 years old. It emerged organically after the start of the pilot. Several of the youth are children of the Sahayogi Saathis.
Sahayogi Saathis Youth Club is composed of 15 members within Tripureshwar between 13 and 20 years old. It emerged organically after the start of the pilot. Several of the youth are children of the Sahayogi Saathis.