The Gurje Village Project
An Umbrella Foundation project proposal

Objective:
The Gurje Village Project will provide hundreds of orphaned, trafficked and conflict-displaced children with the education and vocational skills they need to be able to ultimately return to, repopulate, and rejuvenate their villages following the ten year civil war in Nepal. Nepal is over 90% agricultural; thus it is crucial that the children both live and learn these skills outside the polluted and overpopulated urban setting of Kathmandu. The village of Gurje is situated just 20 km north of the city yet still virtually undeveloped, making it an ideal environment in which to teach Nepal's post-conflict generation the vocational skills they need to revitalize - and in some cases save - their rural communities.

Definition of the problem:
Children, displaced from their own villages, are at risk in the city The civil war in Nepal has displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens from their homes, leading to severe overcrowding, poverty, and high unemployment in the capital of Kathmandu. Especially worrying is that that thousands of children have been trafficked into Kathmandu by men who falsely promise parents to provide their children with education at a top boarding school far from the Maoist threat. Parents pay relatively vast sums for this "service" only to have traffickers simply abandon the children in destitute orphanages in the city.

The future of Nepal's villages depends on the safe return of displaced children Nepal, the ninth poorest country in the world, is an overwhelmingly agricultural nation; its thousands of rural communities make up the backbone of society. In the overpopulated capital of Kathmandu there are very few prospects of employment, even for the well-educated. Thus, the future of the country lies squarely in ensuring the next generation in the villages has the tools to provide desperately-needed economic stimulus in their respective communities. As Nepal's displaced, trafficked, and orphaned children are rescued from destitution, they must be given an opportunity to escape the confines of Kathmandu to prevent becoming institutionalized in an urban environment and to be allowed to become productive and contributing members of Nepal's village society. Until they are able to safely return to their own villages, this is the only way to sustain their way of life, their cultural heritage, and the only livelihood available to them.

Methodology:
The Umbrella Foundation of Nepal is prepared to relocate its $150,000 annual operation currently in Kathmandu to Gurje to reintegrate the children into a safe and secure rural environment outside the overcrowded and polluted capital.

The Gurje Village Project is a two-stage process:

The first stage, will be a pilot project, funded mainly by the Umbrella Foundation itself. This pilot project is aimed at improving the quality of education in Gurje and building trust in the community.

In this first stage, Umbrella will take three concrete steps to raising the quality of education in the village: 1.) improving the physical infrastructure of local school, 2.) hiring three additional staff: one additional teacher to assist the current sole government teacher, a cook, and a part-time administrator, and 3.) to provide a good meal to the students to give these impoverished children a practical incentive to attend school every day.

The school will have the capacity to enroll 80 children. With a second teacher, classes can be taught in separate rooms and children can learn more effectively. The part-time administrator will be responsible for ordering and bringing school supplies and food for school lunches from Kathmandu. We will add electricity and a water source for the school to bring it up to a minimum standard for education.

The second stage will expand our operations and provide a comprehensive plan for providing trafficked and displaced children with a home and vocational training. The first step in this process will be setting up the necessary infrastructure - building homes for the children, a school large enough to accommodate over two hundred children, and excellent facilities to provide vocational training in addition to their traditional education. Most importantly, they will be living in a rural environment where they can put these skills to immediate use and begin to adapt back into village life.

The second step will be hiring the staff, locally whenever possible, but also experts from Kathmandu who can provide training in agricultural techniques, vocational skills such as carpentry and sewing, and craft-making for export to larger markets. In short, they will learn skills that they can bring back to their respective villages someday, not only to provide for their own families, but to become teachers of these crafts within their communities. Additionally, the very implementation of the project itself will give a significant economic boost to the village of Gurje, providing jobs and training for the community.

The following are three examples of activities in the second stage of the project:

Vocational training
In addition to receiving a good quality standard education, the Gurje Village Project will teach vocational skills to the trafficked children rescued by the Umbrella Foundation as well as the children and adults of the village of Gurje and the surrounding areas. These skills must be transferable, to teach others in the village. In the first stage of the project, the pilot phase, we will concentrate on making sure we raise the quality of education in the local school for the eighty children and ensuring the children are fed properly. But even in this phase we will be looking towards our larger goal of providing vocational training; the Umbrella Foundation will create a market for the fruits, vegetables, and dairy products produced by the villagers. Not only will this promote self-sustainability, but also implement a concrete system whereby products of the village can be prepared and sold on the market.

The second phase of the project will mark the beginning of a formal vocational training program. We will begin by teaching skills that are relevant immediately to the development of their own village; for example, by improving agricultural skills and teaching innovating techniques, they can improve both their own quality of life and sell them in the market we have created in the pilot phase. We will also set up training in carpentry and construction, since the people of Gurje will be responsible for building and improving homes and a school in their own village (in cooperation with experts in this vocation). Sewing is another likely area for training, as it provides respectable employment for women in Nepal. Bee-keeping and goat farming are two more likely areas for vocational training. Before implementing any training programs, however, we will consult at length with the villagers themselves to understand what their real needs are.

Health Program
Currently there is no health post of any kind in Gurje or the surrounding area. The Umbrella Foundation will build and employ the staff for a local health post that can be maintained by the villagers, and which is accessible to anyone from the surrounding wards who needs medical attention. This health post will not only respond to the immediate medical needs of the citizens of the village, but will also carry out on-going programs such as a de-worming program, providing necessary vitamin supplements to the people, raising awareness about critical health issues such as HIV/AIDS and personal hygiene.

School Gardens

To ensure the children are learning basic agricultural skills from an early age, we will start a series of school gardens in Gurje, where the children can tend to vegetables, plant trees, and do small-scale animal husbandry.

Partnerships and a plan for long-term sustainability:
To ensure long-term sustainability following the conclusion of any grants, the Umbrella Foundation is prepared to shift its own financial resources into the Gurje Village Project. The budget will require an initial injection of capital to create the facilities and launch the project, then will be sustained for the long term by the Umbrella Foundation, an NGO with proven track record for consistently raising over $150,000 per year to provide for destitute children. In terms of partnerships, the government of Nepal has already committed to offering us land to build the required infrastructure, as well as a building on the premises to be used to house project staff. We are actively seeking partners for this project, both domestically and internationally, and have received a warm response from those organisations looking for innovative and practical solutions to the crisis of displaced children in post-conflict Nepal. Other organizations who have expressed great interest in this project include Habitat for Humanity, Planete Enfants and the Embassy of France to Nepal. The Umbrella Foundation's Gurje Village Project is in line with "The Essential Package - twelve interventions to improve the health and nutrition of school-age children" which has been put together by the World Food Programme and UNICEF to ensure all aspects of children's health and security. Our activities in this project will contribute to the success of this framework, and we believe in cooperating with strong partners to maximize our impact, work to our strengths, and avoid duplication.

Budget:
We are in the process of developing a full and detailed budget for our project. The budget will be graduated so that we can begin small and expand the operation and number of children we can help based on the level of financial support we can procure.