The Thami
Through its partner, Educate the Children, CBB has funded six low-caste women's groups in Nepal. These 130 women receive training in literacy, health care, micro-business skills, leadership, women's rights and marital relationships in an intensive five year program. The women's husbands are required to participate in some of their training with them. One child of each woman, preferably a girl, receives financial support for her education.
The women CBB is funding for the next five years are from the Thami people, an ethnic group living 25 miles from the Nepalese border with Tibet. This community-wide project will raise the quality of life for these deeply impoverished people.
Each of the women's groups will have a micro-bank into which they will deposit 30 to 70 cents a month. By borrowing from their banks, women in groups CBB has sponsored in the past have begun family businesses such as raising pigs or goats, jewelry making, tailoring, shoe-repair, a tea house or commercial flower gardens, etc. The focus of the Thami women's group businesses will probably be agricultural.
The annual cost of funding a group of 25 Thami women in Nepal is $1,500.
A women's group: Gairi Kuwa
The women of the Gairi Kuwa (Deep Well) group have completed their five years of training, and have “graduated”, along with women from other groups, into an independent cooperative that will be self-governing and able to undertake larger and more ambitious development projects. Only one of the 19 women, aged 20 to 60, had gone to school beyond the fourth grade before joining this group.
Most of the Gairi Kuwa women have specialized in raising flowers, although one of the them began a successful tea house. The women grow several dozen varieties of flowers, including high-value flowers not otherwise found in Nepal. Traditional flowers are sold at temples as offerings to local deities, while the high-value flowers are marketed in the city center to higher income buyers.
The women pick the flowers in the late afternoon and make them into bouquets in the evening. At 4 AM the next morning, they take a bus into Kathmandu to sell their flowers, returning home by 9 AM. The women then do their daily household chores, returning to picking flowers again in the afternoon.
The income the women earn supplements the $2 some of their husbands earn in day labor. Other husbands are "employed" by their wives in their flower business. Being landless, the women rent land to grow their flowers. Having no savings, they borrowed from their group's micro-bank, into which each woman deposits the equivalent of 70 cents every month.
