It’s embarrassing to recall that I once jockingly mocked my mother in law who knit countless mittens for children in developing countries; ‘Mavis, even if you knit until the cows come home you can’t possibly hope to make a dent’. My wife told me that she felt her mother made mittens because every time she saw an impoverished child in a picture or on TV her fingers got cold. I think what she did was simply driven out of something in her heart; if you could make one child somewhere happy by providing them with a pair of mittens, you had changed that single person’s life in a positive way. And there has to be something good about that.
Most experts on world poverty believe that the social and economic inclusion of women and disadvantaged groups is a key enabler to improving local communities and ending the cycle of poverty. Although descrimination against certain castes and women has been legislated against in Nepal, in much of the nation outside Kathmandu a rigid and ancient social order retains its stubborn grip*. Working in rural Nepal I think I have been on the very frontier of this issue. And sometimes I wonder if I have really been successful at making a meaningful impact.
Yesterday I hosted a workshop for 25 local cooperative representatives which focused on how to bring access to insurance programs to small farmers. Following a report by the World Bank in 2009, there is a pressing need to bring technical skills and knowledge to "scale up" mutual insurance schemes in the agricultural sector of Nepal. Even without many of the things we take for granted in Canada, like a stable political and legal environment, Nepalese have a burning desire to build their own capacity and find ways to collectively protect themselves against loss.
It is a monumental and daunting task, but I guess the workshop for members of the local cooperatives in the Hetauda region is a start.
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| DCMPU Workshop- winners of a Canadian Toque in the Nepal/Canada Dairy Knowledge Quiz |
* More about what is the Caste system at; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_Nepal
