Nubri Schulprojekte 2023

Background

Nepal is a small country. With an area of 147,181 km2, it is only about 3 times the size of Switzerland. It has around 20 million inhabitants and lies between Tibet and India. With the Himalayas as the topographical border to the north, landlocked Nepal with its ancient culture was largely isolated from the outside world until the 1950s. In 2008, the 240-year-old monarchy was abolished and Nepal was declared a federal democratic republic.

Since then, the country has not settled down and is constantly confronted with political and social unrest. In view of the ongoing political and economic turbulence, mistrust of the government is high among broad sections of the population. Only a few can be integrated into the economic or political system. In their desperate situation, many young people emigrate to countries with good economic opportunities - in the hope of a better future or at least a wage as a migrant worker for themselves and their families. Much has been done to reduce poverty in the country, often by the population themselves. Twenty years ago, almost every second family lived in extreme poverty Poverty and combined earned less than $1.25 a day2, today it is about one in four families. Although the number of people affected by poverty has halved, a large part of the population still lives in pure subsistence farming and abject poverty. The severe earthquake in 2015 and the Covid pandemic (including a slump in tourism and labor migration) worsened the situation for the poorest in society and pushed many who previously had a regular income to the poverty line.

The Nubri region is located in remote north-central Nepal, near the Tibetan border. The geographically isolated area in the high Himalayas is not accessible to vehicles. The village of Ghap is over 3,500 meters above sea level and has almost 1,000 inhabitants. The village of Prok is located slightly below at around 2,400 meters above sea level. The villages can only be reached on foot (about 5 days' walk from the nearest road near Kathmandu) or by expensive helicopter flight (which the locals cannot afford). The Nubri region is a well-known trekking area. However, the villages are not on the main trekking route and can therefore hardly benefit from tourism. They are among the poorest villages in the region. The population of Ghap and Prok is predominantly Tibetan Buddhist and speaks a Tibetan dialect.

The Ghap School

Project objectives and beneficiaries

Due to the central location of Ghap village, the school can accommodate 87 students from both sides of the Nubri and lower Tsum valleys, serving grades 1 to 8. The school consists of the following buildings: a dormitory each for boys and girls, a dining room and a kitchen, the other rooms are classrooms.

After the 2015 earthquake, the school received donations from various sources to enable the reconstruction and continue to provide education to the children. However, these donations have now dried up and the school desperately needed more financial support to keep going. This enables the continuation of school operations and thus the basic education of the future population of the Nubri region. Ghap School not only provides the children with a quality education, but also helps preserve the region's unique cultural and religious traditions by allowing parents to keep their children in the village. The aim is for the school management to continuously actively generate new sources of income in order to be able to support the financial input more broadly and not be dependent on the sole support of ROKPA. For this purpose, it is intended that the team at the Ghap School, with the support of ROKPA, will proactively prepare and implement a fundraising strategy, to find new donors for the school.

The Prok Kindergarten

The original Prok school building was constructed in 1969 and was initially run by a single teacher. Like almost every school in the mountains, the Prok School could not offer a high-quality education, since both the students and the teachers were only irregularly present and the school could not be properly supervised. For this reason, most of the local residents sent those children who were selected for an education to Kathmandu to go to school or to be ordained for a monastic education. In this way, the school could be operated more in the long run. The building was empty. But those who cannot enjoy an education in Kathmandu are the youngest. ROKPA supported the local population in renovating the school building, making it child-friendly and providing a classroom for a kindergarten. The kindergarten was officially opened in 2019

Project objectives and beneficiaries

The Prok Kindergarten project aims to lay the foundation for early childhood education in the remote village of Prok. The kindergarten offers space for around 12 children aged 3 to 6 years. This facility supports young children and their families by providing them with food, care and a progressive approach to education. At the same time, the preservation of the unique Tibetan and Buddhist influenced local culture should be promoted.

The direct beneficiaries are the approximately 12 children who can attend the kindergarten, as well as the two teachers and the cook who are employed by the kindergarten. In addition, the parents also benefit from free care including meals and, in a broader sense, the entire village from the kindergarten, since a smaller local economic cycle is created, the parents as workers are less tied to the care of small children, and last but not least because the local culture of can be lived and passed on to the children.