To Our Friends and Supporters,
With this document we are sharing the results of fifteen years of WACN: who we are, our accomplishments, what we have learned, and the challenges that lie ahead. As we go forward, we continue to believe that a focus on poverty alleviation will provide the greatest results in addressing issues such as violence and human trafficking, as well as the improvement of women’s everyday lives.
We celebrate the great success of our community-based development program, and the Co-operatives promoted under that program, which have generated women savings of over 180 Million Rupees. Our success lies in the fact that where we were once initiating development activities, now it is being initiated and carried out locally through Co-operatives. Some of their stories are shared in this report.
Within five or six years, we expect that the rest of the co-operatives will have built community centers, providing office space for the co-operatives, as well as resource centers for the community. The building of the community centers requires working in cooperation with a number of groups, as well as raising funds. It is therefore an opportunity for co-operative members to broaden their skills and advocacy work.
The sustainable agriculture program has been scaling up toward commercial vegetable production and many women are taking the role of lead farmer. This has afforded greater status to these women, as well as providing an enhanced livelihood.
During 2004, we hired a team of independent evaluators. Their report concluded that most of our goals and objectives were being met in our current projects. However, we do have challenges ahead. The coming year will be focused on building our internal capabilities to provide support to a growing number of savings and credit groups and cooperatives. We plan to begin expanding our training capacity in order to broaden our support of co-operatives, both those that we have helped to build, and those who come to us daily seeking guidance. We also plan to expand the development model for easy replication by other groups.
With the encouragement of good friends, board members, staff, and co-operative women, we have found the energy to continue to contribute our time and effort to a program that is now supplying us with ample indicators of success. We work together with the village community above party politics. With the continued support of our donors, Helvetas Nepal, Helvetas SSMP, Match International Canada and IDEX, as well as ESP Nepal, which funded the evaluation study, and the volunteers who provide us with untiring support, we will be able to translate this success into expansion of our operations and improved lives for women across Nepal.
Prativa Subedi |