By Srishti Jayana | Communication and Documentation Officer
Griha Shramik Sarokar Samaj is one of the grantee partners of Tewa located at the center of Kathmandu. Since the establishment, it is working to provide income generating training to home-based workers. To help promote women to come out of the house and do something on their own so they could also have a stake on something was the core motto of the establishment of this organization.
During the earthquake recovery program, 22 volunteers who have been deployed in 6 most affected districts formed many women's group at different places. Later on, Griha Shramik helped the existing 11 women's group in Kathmandu to register under women’s saving and cooperative. The common thing about these women cooperatives were the women involved in it had some kind of income-generating skills already.
The struggle of bringing women out of the house and getting them involved in other works was real. Since the women already attained some sort of income generating skill, a back support was only required to push them further.
Our volunteer/grantee partner Kamla Panta encouraged women from these cooperatives to save 0.001 USD per day which makes USD 0.3 per month to develop the habit of savings and the importance of it.
Mostly the idea of cooperative implies providing services and financial advice to its member. But these women’s cooperatives are running on a different scale. The motto behind the initiation of these cooperatives was to help the development of the community in overall.
Later on, the cooperatives started providing additional training on income generating activities like weaving, sewing, organic cultivation, pickle making and so on. This helped the women's group to support their admin cost as well.
Today, all of these women’s group are operating as cooperative and savings and 4 of it is registered as NGOs. Griha Shramik has supported these women organization from the very start to build its foundation.
Griha Shramik is also in a network of other organizations who work for home-based workers and together they are lobbying with the government for the recognition of their work. Also, they have requested to add the value of their work so that it can be counted in the National GDP of Nepal.
For the lobbying, Tewa supported Griha Shramik with the grant to organize a training. During this training, Executive Director of Tewa, Urmila Shrestha was invited to share about the work of Tewa is doing and the philosophy Tewa is adapting to sustain for the long run. The women were so moved by the words that they have initiated the endowment fund within their organization. Every member of the organization contributed some money and they were able to raise 5000/- USD for the endowment fund only. The money was then deposited in the bank. And now they have planned to provide a grant support from the interest collected from the bank to one of those 11 cooperatives who will do outstanding work.
Apart from IG works and supporting other women groups, this organization is for the Rights of Home Based Workers as well. Mostly, Home based work is not permanent and do not provide many facilities. To help the home-based workers have some financial security from their work, the organization is also organizing meetings with ministry level so that they could agree on making an identification card to those workers.
By Srishti Jayana | Communication and Documentation Officer
By Srishti Jayana | Communication and Documentation Officer
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