Problem

Thousands of families in rural Nepal have been forced to sell their daughters, some as young as six, to work in faraway cities as bonded servants. The situation is tailor-made for abuse. Many of the girls never return home, some of them forced into prostitution. Very few of the girls attend school. The fathers receive an average of $50 a year for their daughters’ services, and the girls get nothing. The families don’t want to sell their daughters, but they can’t do without the income.

The Gift

This gift will rescue a girl in Nepal from a childhood spent in virtual slavery as a servant in a house or a dishwasher in a tea shop, far from home. In addition to protecting her human rights, your gift will enable her come home to live with her family and pay for her to attend school for one year, probably for the first time. It will pay for her school uniform, school fees, books, and a kerosene lamp with kerosene so she can study at night. (Most families in rural Nepal live without electricity.) The gift will also provide her family with a piglet or goat which they can raise and sell for the same amount their daughter would have earned. These girls are usually the first females in their families to receive an education! This program also has a micro-lending component, which instructs the mothers on starting their own businesses. Thousands of girls, newly freed and empowered, now attend school under the auspices of the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation (NYOF). There are thousands more who need to be rescued.