All of us here at Language Development Center Nepal are very pleased with the progress we have achieved with your support. Here is an update from the work taking place in Dang District, with the Tharu community.

Community Groups: 5 Women’s groups
Number of group members: 175 women
Each group meets once a month. Project staff is regularly providing support to develop their capacity through training, one-to-one coach and group discussion.

Literacy: 5 literacy classes
Number of participants: 143 (all women, 118 are group members)
Local facilitators, supported by supervisors, are leading classes six days a week to achieve goals of teaching women to read, write, and do basic math.

Words from the participant:
Sugani Chaudhary, Age 25, Lalpur, Manpur
“This program is helping me understand the importance of local skills, knowledge, product and market for sustainable economic development. I am very happy with this program and started family based income generation activities. We had literacy classes on goat keeping course and vegetable farming. This helped us to start vegetable production for sale and Goat keeping.”

Get One Give One gift program.
Project provide 36 goats to as a gift to 36 poor families selected by our community groups. Each group manages these activities. There is an agreement with group and members that within the next 18 months they will provide baby goats to another 36 families.

Words from the participant:
Chunki Chaudhary, Age 32, Karmatia, Dhikpur
Chunki Chaudhary got one goat as a gift from the project. She is very happy. She said, “I am using the skills and knowledge which I got from the literacy course about goat keeping. I am willing to support my other neighbors to start family based small IG activities. As our agreement with group members I am happy to pass gift as a baby goat to another member with in 18 months. “

Pancthar
Community meeting:
We had very productive conversations and meetings with three different Limbu communities to select working areas and to introduce the project to the community. Communities agreed to form 3 women’s groups and identify literacy class facilitators with in August 2011. Project staff will be in touch with local communities to encourage them to keep continue group activities. We anticipate about 130 -150 women will be actively involve in this program. The number will increase if we able to provide more support on income generation activities.

Here it is still monsoon, which means there are heavy rains and travel is difficult, so the community decided to begins the functional literacy class from second week of September 2011. Before that facilitators are will be trained how to develop teaching learning materials and use to it literacy classes.

Literacy classes and community groups are already running successfully in Dang District, in the Tharu community, where the first distribution of baby goats has already taken place. Look for an update about that work shortly.

Please continue to check our website, http://www.ldcnepal.org/ for updates on our progress, and share the link with friends and family who might be interested. Thank you for your continued support of the work we do and the communities we work with.