ANSWER - Nepali Students' & Women's Education Relief
ANSWER is a non-religious, non-partisan organization which holds that education is essential in order to address the problems of poverty, social inequities and injustices and to support representative institutions and government through non-violent means.
ANSWER is dedicated to helping low-caste and impoverished people of Nepal address these problems of poverty through education, primarily by providing educational sponsorships for low-caste and impoverished students.
ANSWER provides a means whereby a sponsor’s donation is directly applied to a child’s education without funds being extracted for salaries and other administrative costs.
ANSWER recognizes the impact of disruptive events on a child’s education and shall do what we can to assist the families of our sponsored children who whose education is compromised by such events.
ANSWER provides educational opportunity by which sponsors can learn about the lives and problems of the developing world.
Description:
ANSWER students are sponsored at cost by Western families and individual – usually around $250 per year, which covers tuition, fees, books and supplies, uniforms, shoes, book bags, etc…everything a student needs. The student’s family is required to spend something they can afford on the child, too…like a second pair of shoes, so that they, too, are invested in the program.
We enroll them in private English-medium schools because they need English for a decent career. We are 35 for 35 in sending our high school students on to college and 3/3 in graduating our students into good careers. This year we graduated 15 students from high school; six in distinction (A+) and nine with 1st division marks (A’s & B’s). One has a full ride scholarship and three others are still hopeful. Most of our college students are in business, nursing, and health sciences where jobs are much more plentiful. We steer them away from engineering and careers that have little employment value or lead into the brain drain. Our graduates and students are on our board and we will soon be hiring them to take over the administration and selecting the next generation of students from the disadvantaged. We have instituted a Social Welfare Club on Saturdays that make our children aware of the need to address community needs rather than just building dynasties of wealth centered on just family needs.
ANSWER pays for its own administration through separate donations and fundraisers. Our overhead for three FTE's, an office, equipment and other overhead is well under $10,000 as we are spending our “own hard-earned money.”
History:
American-Nepali Students’ and Women’s Educational Relief was founded in 2001 after obtaining excellent results with out own little “street girl”, Uma, whom we placed in a private school in Kathmandu. After 3 years, she had become fluent in English, had made up for being placed back two years initially, and was obtaining top marks. From wanting to simply learn to read and count, she began to feel she wanted to be a doctor. Today, Uma is in nursing school along with other young women in our program. Six years after founding and many refinements, we have over 400 children in 100 schools and colleges all over Nepal. All of our children are college bound.
ANSWER is a nonprofit, non-partisan, non-religious organization that believes in empowering low caste children by introducing them to quality education. Education for us does not mean literacy nor basic education, but 12-15 years of education through college with careful academic and career counseling (which we alone provide – unknown entity in Nepal, otherwise). Our mission is to educate children from the lowest castes and provide them with real lifelong careers so that they will be come the vanguard for real change in Nepal. They will be the ones pushing for universal, compulsory education and government scholarships, etc.
Contact people:
Address:
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2363 Plymouth SEGrand Rapids, MI 49506(See a map) |
Web Site: http://www.answer-nepal.org/
| Last updated on September 10, 2009 |
