YYY Foundation

YYY Foundation is a UK registered charity working with remote communities in Nepal to help them become more self-reliant.

Rural communities in Nepal are often marginalised from development in other parts of the country and thus fall further behind.  Subsistence farming isn’t enough to support these communities and as a result, most of the male working population leave to find work elsewhere.  Due to their lack of education most will end up in poorly paid and dangerous jobs with little chance of sending the intended money home.  For the girls the situation is worse. They don’t have the means or knowledge to manage their menstruation in school and most will need to stay away for a week each month. It’s therefore highly unusual for a girl to complete her education and many girls are married off in their early teens. For others the future is even bleaker. They become prime targets for traffickers who regularly visit remote areas with false promises of good safe jobs and a better future for the family if they give their daughters away. Generally, these are one-way tickets to working the dangerous back streets of trucker towns in India with no benefit to the girls or their families.

We are working with these communities, helping them to become more self-reliant by creating opportunities for themselves and ending menstrual discrimination.  We partner with community leaders, experts in the fields of women’s health and IT, to create a package of help for each area we are involved with. 

• Provision of Women's Health services. Mainly to girls attending schools, teachers and wherever possible women from the wider community.  We deliver a seminar teaching girls about menstruation and dispelling myths that it is somehow the girls’ fault.  They learn basic family planning, hygiene, their rights to an education, and above all self-esteem. Towards the end of each seminar the girls are given a menstruation kit with pants, washable waterproof pant liners, washable pads, a waterproof dirty bag, soap, and a flannel. They are shown how to use the kits before leaving.  The kits are high quality, are hand made in Kathmandu and will last up to 3 years. They can be easily replicated and contents replaced and renewed by the girls when needed.

• Provision of IT equipment, resources and teacher training. Each school must enter into a formal agreement with us setting out everyone’s responsibilities. The school is responsible for providing a safe and clean room with the required furniture, for which we provide the plans.  They must also send 2 staff members to Kathmandu where they are trained in IT skills and their effective use.  Once the school is ready, we send a team with all the hardware appropriate to the number of pupils and teachers to the school, along with a full software package that includes lesson plans for teachers in a variety of subjects.  The team install the computers and give additional training to staff.  Going forward we guarantee the equipment for 3 years and we provide a phone number the school can call for ongoing help and mentoring. In return the school must open after hours for adult IT classes and computer access to the community. They must charge an affordable fee that is put into a dedicated account.  After 3 years there will be enough in the account for the school to be self sufficient and pay for their own repairs or replacements as needed.

Our impact

Case study: Sabina grew up the eldest of 2 daughters, in a small village in Likhu district north of Kathmandu. Her family are subsistence farmers. When the earthquake of 2015 hit the village, she was playing with her sister and a friend in a neighbour’s house. The house collapsed around the children, they were pinned down, trapped by rubble and Sabina’s friend was severely injured.

We first met Sabina in 2016 when she and her family were living in a makeshift shack in the community compound. All the houses had been destroyed, and the villagers were having to live and eat communally. There was a single mud toilet for 150 people. Although she was just a child, twice a day her responsibilities where to collect animal fodder and water for livestock and her family then help her mother in the communal kitchen.

The school was in ruins. Classes would take place in the footprint of previous buildings and the lack of facilities meant children could only attend school part time.  We became involved in 2017 and we were able to build an additional 4 classrooms to give the school essential facilities to enable its pupils to return to full time education.

When we moved from disaster rebuilding to improving education the school was our first choice to trial the program, and they have matched our help every step of the way.  It’s a vibrant place of learning; the classrooms we originally built are now a colourful and well used library, a projector room for pupils to watch videos and an early learning centre that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere.  We also equipped the school with the first IT suite and held our first women’s health program here.

As a direct result of years of developing and improving the school Sabina was in the first group of students to pass their exams and go on to college.  In fact, Sabina was the first of many girls from the school to continue her education into college.  She worked hard, paying much of her own way with part time jobs and has now finished college. Sabina is now managing a flagship coffee shop in Kathmandu and supporting her younger sister while she studies for her degree at Kathmandu University.

Your impact

By donating to YYY Foundation you will be enabling us to expand into more communities and give them just enough help to develop in their own way. Something as simple as a £10 donation will give a girl a menstruation kit and the opportunity to stay in school to complete her education.  Larger donations or fundraisers could cover the costs of helping all the girls in an entire school. Or perhaps even provide an IT suite that will create opportunities for hundreds of children and their community. Help us to provide a lasting legacy.