FUNCTIONAL LITERACY

This is our Women’s Program which involves literacy, financial literacy, entrepreneurial studies and life skills for urban poor women. In the past, we offered a 9 month program and had over 500 women complete the training. However, we realised that many of them were bouncing from training to training, having come to us from other organisations and with still limited functional skills. We currently offer the program less formally, working with women in our network in their homes and networks and through our monthly meetings, to ensure that the skills are directly incorporated within their routines and personalised to their issues. Many of these workshops are run by our students who are learning these skills through their Dream Catchers Life Skills workshops, paying forward their new skills with their parents, aunts, uncles and community members.

We also support women to establish sustainable businesses Click Here. We work through a feasibility study with them and support them with a start-up loan but they do not pay it back to us – they pay it forward to the next group of women and mentor them through the process. Part of our commitment to developing networks to support each other.

The Junkiri Award aims to empower Nepal’s youth to light up their own futures, much like the Junkiri (firefly) does.

The Award contains 6 “wedges”, each a literacy necessary to thrive in the modern world:

One of our gorgeous partners, Libby Hathorn, wrote a children’s story based on a young girl in Nepal and her path towards her dreams through an education, called Sangita’s Singing. We use this book both to raise funds for Mitrataa and also as a tool to educate Nepali teachers on how to use a tool other than the text book to teach the students literacy, stories, bullying, town v village, using our strengths to overcome challenges and many other themes.

We were then very excited to turn the book into a musical with script and lyrics written by Libby Hathorn and music composed by Elise Morton, who visited Nepal to produce our first production of the musical.

Under Elise’s mentoring a cast of 30 students from one of our partner schools, Wilson Academy, did 3 performances – one for their peers at school, one for their parents and then the final one in front of 200 members of the Mitrataa family. Sangita’s Singing is a story with universal themes – literacy, education, bullying, celebrating our strengths, friendship. There were 11 Mitrataa students in the cast and watching them develop so much confidence and new skills was a privilege, especially Sudip who used to be shy and now has discovered a love of dancing and sharing his ideas with people. Each and every one of the cast opened themselves up to learning so much. We are now planning to run the musical program with some of our partner village schools.

You can hear one of the songs, the Song of Kathmandu, here

Financial literacy is one of the greatest challenges facing Nepalis. At its core is a strong fear of numbers learned and taught over generations in school. It isn’t possible to rote learn maths, so many children fail and develop a fear of numbers. This means that they cannot do basic budgeting or other skills necessary for household and small business financial management. We want to demystify maths and numbers and make them accessible to the kids and women we work with, to empower them to make great, informed and confident financial decisions in their future.