WACN is now recognized nationally and internally as a cost-effective and sustainable organization that reaches form the grassroots to assist women in achieving socio-economic independence and empowerment. This recognition has both benefits and cost s that we will have to address as we move forward. Women’s groups from other areas now come to us for training and help in building their programs and cooperatives. We see the opportunity to expand our program without starting new women’s groups, and must choose how we want to move forward.

The strategic planning has become imperative as we must balance our limited resources among the opportunities, and ensure that our resources continue to be targeted toward our primary goalpoverty alleviation and women's empowerment. But there is a cost to these opportunities in terms of time spent. Much of our staff has historically been either low-paid or volunteer, and we can not continue to expand our programs without the funding to expand and train our dedicated staff.

All of the change is in an environment of Nepal political and socio-economic challenges one of the enabling factors of the insurgency is poverty, and our programs are directly targeted at poverty alleviation. There is therefore a growing need for such programs to pull together communities, and help them to develop institutions that will sustain poverty alleviation in the long run. It is imperative that our programs continue to build in this area, whether through expansion of our CBDP and cooperatives into new VDCs and districts, or through assisting existing women's groups to institutionalize their operations for greater impact. Only through local development do we see the potential for peace in our country.