Projects: Stop Girl Trafficking

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SGT College Scholars - The Next Step

It's not just for primary school - SGT helps girls prepare for a career, too.

Fifteen years ago, the American Himalayan Foundation joined forces with Rural Health and Education Services Trust (RHEST) to create STOP Girl Trafficking, a partnership that – to date – has kept over 10,000 girls in Nepal safe from being trafficked. The strength of our approach is its directness: we go to the villages where girls are in danger, put them in school and give them counseling and mentoring. We have found that the longer a girl stays in school, the more valued she becomes by her family and in her own eyes - and the less vulnerable she is to being sold or lured into bondage.

It works! And our girls are successfully graduating from high school. But public high school still ends at Grade 10 in Nepal and the girls are then only 16 years old. Without their last two or three years of education – what we would think of as senior high or the beginning of junior college in this country - they are not qualified for most jobs and, young as they still are, are prime candidates for being trafficked.

Having come so far and overcome such obstacles in their young lives, we felt it only right to commit to help these girls complete the last, critical step in their education – the one that qualifies them for jobs in teaching, health care, or business – and means they can serve their communities in significant ways.

This year we have 464 girls enrolled in this capstone step; it takes two to three years and costs only $400 per girl per year. Then they are truly safe – and on the way to create vastly better lives for themselves and their families. They are change agents.

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