With over 15 years’ experience in Nepal, Pact had a long-term commitment in the country to women’s issues, the promotion of literacy, the growth of democracy and increasing the economic and social status of vulnerable peoples. Pact began in Nepal managing a subgrant for World Education to develop Naya Goreto, a national literacy program funded by USAID. These materials broke new ground in several important ways by including interactive and empowering exercises that mobilized women to learn together in small groups. Though Pact Nepal has since closed, the impact of this and other work in the country has had lasting success.
With the opening of Pact’s first office in Nepal in 1988, an expanded design team helped to further Naya Goreto’s reach. In 1994, Pact received a grant from USAID to implement an innovative pilot project, Women Reading for Development (WORD). Working through 1,100 NGOs, WORD reached women in 70 of the country’s 75 districts with remarkable results. By 1996, dropout rates in the literacy program were only 16%, and costs had plummeted to only a fraction of those of the previous Naya Goreto initiative. Through WORD, over 550,000 women participated in adult literacy classes and nearly 350,000 Nepali women learned to read at a third grade level.
While this project proved the role of literacy to be a powerful entry point for working with women, it did not address the priority needs expressed by women, especially income generation. Further, Pact recognized that there was a serious shortage of post-literacy materials geared to rural neoliterate women. At the same time USAID’s research found that, compared to those who only complete literacy classes, women who furthered their skills through post-literacy courses had higher self-confidence, more children who attended school, and increased involvement in collective activities. This evidence, combined with women’s continuing demand for literacy, their hunger for post-literacy materials, and the top priority they gave to learning how to increase family incomes, demanded yet another approach. USAID/Nepal decided to embark on a new strategy that would promote economic empowerment as the focal point for furthering women’s literacy skills. In doing so, USAID/Nepal became the only mission in the world to make women a primary objective of its national strategy.
During this same period Pact also undertook its own research, leading to the development of the first Savings and Credit series, which was piloted in western Nepal. Lessons learned from this pilot informed the design and delivery of the Women’s Empowerment Program (WEP), which began in 1997.
WEP delivered a package of literacy, savings, credit, microenterprise, and microfinance to a target population of over 120,000 rural women in 21 Terai districts. The project was carried out by Pact, its NGO partner ECTA, The Asia Foundation, and a network of local NGOs at the district level. By 1999 Pact introduced its new action-oriented curriculum, Women in Business, to 125,000 women through over 100 field staff and 245 indigenous organizations. These organizations were primarily NGOs but also included cooperatives, the Grameen Bank, NIRDHAN (a Grameen bank replicator), and Parks and People funded by UNDP. In addition, over 800 Empowerment Workers hired by the local partners provided training and technical support. By the end of USAID’s funding for WEP in September 2001, the program had achieved some remarkable results, including more than doubling the women’s savings from USD 720,000 to USD 1,800,000, tripling the number of women who can read and write and quadrupling the number of women in business from 19,000 to 86,000.
Localization of Pact as Samjhauta Nepal
At the conclusion of the WEP, there was a strong desire expressed by the women to continue the program. To meet this need Pact decided to help establish a new, locally registered NGO managed by former Nepali staff members of the Pact office. With a clear strategy and vision, Samjhauta Nepal was officially registered in November 2001 under the name of Pact Nepal/Samjhauta Nepal and later as Samjhauta Nepal. Pact continued to fund some WEP activities through Samjhauta Nepal.
Partnership between Pact and Samjhauta Nepal
In April 2002 Pact and Samjhauta Nepal partnered to implement the World Bank Development Marketplace, a project running until June 2003, geared toward piloting HIV/AIDS post-literacy materials with WEP groups. In September 2002 Pact and Samjhauta Nepal entered into a second partnership to implement a three-year project as a subgrantee to CARE Nepal (the prime organization for the USAID contract), in collaboration with CEDPA and Winrock, to strengthen the role of civil society and women in democracy and governance. The specific goals of this project were to increase women’s literacy, heighten women’s participation in elected local government, and increase the capacity of civil society organizations to advocate for change. Pact and Samjhauta Nepal lead the development of post-literacy materials to instruct that women elected and nominated as political representatives about their rights, roles and responsibilities.
