International Partnership

In 2007 SHEP entered into a learning partnership with the Nepalese organisation, Sahakarmi Samaj (‘Interdependent Community’), a community development organisation that has worked on community empowerment projects in Nepal since 1998.

Like SHEP, Sahakarmi Samaj specialises in the training and deployment in the community of skilled facilitators. The main aim of the organisation is to strengthen and mobilise community groups and networks in order to address social, health and economic challenges.

Sahakarmi’s facilitators work to build trust and solidarity among members of village communities and provide support to community groups, as they learn how to manage their affairs through democratic deliberation and planned collective action. Since 2007, Sahakarmi’s work has led to the establishment of over 288 community-based organisations which continue to address the direct needs of their respective communities, directly helping over 8,100 disadvantaged people.

Sahakarmi uses the FEST approach (see separate section), which is based on a belief that people themselves can bring real change to their lives and that the role of a supporting NGO is to create an enabling environment. Within this approach, communities independently analyse problems and plan and implement responses appropriate to their situations.

The strategy used by SS comprises the following elements with communities:

• Group and network formation
• Building problem solving skills with the community groups
• Development and capacity building of community groups
• The creation of learning materials
• The creation of a database of local service providers and available resources for use by community groups.

Irish Aid generously supported Sahakarmi Samaj’s work with vulnerable communities in the nine year period 2008- 2016.

An application to Irish Aid’s Civil Society Fund 2018 will shortly be submitted to support a new three year programme entitled ‘ Community Empowerment for Strengthening Local Governance’.

Sahakarmi Samaj is a Nepali Non-Governmental organization committed for the process oriented empowerment approach and sustainable development. A Sahakarmi Samaj (Website)

The organisation was established in 1997 by the experienced professionals committed in the field of community empowerment, human rights, peace and reconciliation and organizational development. SS was registered in district administration office Surkhet and affiliated with SWC Kathmandu.

SS has been working in the areas of community governance, organizational development, human right promotion and sustainable livelihood. SS has implemented various programs to strengthen the marginalized communities in targeted areas over the past 20 years with the support of a range of international donors, including ICCO Co-operation, in p SHEP, Irish Aid, Lutheran World Federation, the World Food Program, Mercy Corps, and Development Fund Norway. SS believes that if an appropriate environment will be provided by building their capacity, developing their leadership and critical consciousness building, they will be able to claim their rights and perform their duties properly.

The organisation has been operating in South Western Nepal in a number of districts including Banke, Kanchanpur, Bardiya, Kailali and Jajarkot. It targets disadvantaged communities such as tribal villages or migrant villages and the facilitators spend 3 years living amongst the villagers, in order to facilitate capacity building.

SS usually works for three years directly with each community group and the support is individually tailored to the specific groups. E.g. of change within villages would be that after SS facilitation, groups would:

• be capable of accessing local government resources to get toilets built, gravel for roads etc, conduct collective farming to increase a communal fund;
• used to fund various village needs e.g. hospital visits, school fees, buying seedlings etc,
• understand the need to build sustainable local resources e.g. planting trees.

Once these grassroots groups are well established, Sahakarmi’s emphasis shifts from facilitating the community groups, to establishing a number of local and regional networking organisations, which will then assist the community groups in their dealings with government and other agencies and advocate necessary policy changes.

The Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the Peoples Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India. Nepal has a population of approximately 30 million. Kathmandu is the nations capital and the country’s largest metropolis. Nepal has a rich geography. The mountainous north has eight of the worlds ten tallest mountains, including the highest point on Earth, Mount Everest. It contains more than 240 peaks over 6,096 m above sea level. This mountainous area contrasts sharply with low-lying, fertile and humid south which is much more urbanized.

Nepal has been a monarchy throughout most of its history. However, a decade-long Civil War by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) during the 1990s, meant that many of the community institutions (user-groups, savings groups, etc.) that had been initiated by International NGOs collapsed following their forced withdrawal. These events left Nepal with a greatly impoverished institutional infrastructure, both in local communities and in local government. They also left the country with a legacy of division and bitterness which has been an obstacle to the revival of collaborative deliberation, planning and development.

Nepal is transiting into federal democratic republican order. Its the biggest transition in Nepal’s history (The Republica, 23 Nov 2017). Local elections in May 2017 elected local bodies for the new federal order with greatly increased powers, responsibilities and resources to help local communities attain their rights to health, education and other services. However, these bodies lack clear operating guidelines and policies to govern at the local level, and methods for engaging with local communities are not clear. There is an urgent need for the vacuum to be filled, to bridge the gaps between communities and local elected bodies, and within local elected bodies.

The community empowerment approach, FEST, developed byd SS, has empowered communities of poor and marginalised people to access internal and external resources across 7 of the 75 districts in Nepal to address their rights to well being. This has been done with Irish Aid support, among others. However, with the sudden change to new federal local government structures and the newly elected bodies in May 2017, and with the lack of clear guidelines and policies for their bodies, the FEST approach and the groups and CBNOs formed by the empowered communities have a unique historical opportunity to enable communities and local elected bodies to work together to establish more accountable and effective governance and thereby greater community access to rights and services.