Women’s Empowerment Programme, Nepal: Marcia Odell
Large steps leading out of the poverty circle
Marcia Odell with eulogist Dr. Karan Singh, Gouverneur of Kashmir and Minister under Indira Gandhi, member of the Club of Rome and of the Club of Budapest
The outstanding innovation of the Women’s Empowerment Programme lies with the success of making women of the lowest rank in society into successful owners of a business and self confident designers of the community’s life – and that within a short time by way of targeted training measures, resulting in shaping people who are able to take on the challenge of life into their own hands.
In a pilot project for 30,000 women in Nepal, native citizens were educated to carry out projects to teach how to read and write, how to found small businesses and village banks and how to manage small health or social projects – and with their knowledge and skill go on to teach others in a snow ball system. After three years, the results with the 130,000 women are thus
- the level of literary has increased from 39,000 to 122,000
- the number of small businesses has risen from 19,000 to 86,000
- income has gone up by 1,2 to more than 10 million Dollars
- 1,000 village banks have been founded
- and 50,000 social projects have been planned and carried out on self initiative
Due to this outstanding success and due to the compatibility of the project with other areas of the world, this project in recent years has been much acclaimed.