OUR MISSION
Educate the Needy Children (ENC) is committed to providing educational access to underprivileged children in Nepal who would otherwise be deprived of schooling due to economic and social challenges they face.
Our approach at ENC is uniquely focused on addressing the specific needs of communities in Nepal. Rather than imposing projects from outside without local buy-in and ownership, our mission has organically grown from the involvement of local communities and leaders. This enables us to directly collaborate and engage with the village residents, understanding their challenges and priorities to ensure our projects are genuinely responsive and beneficial to those we aim to serve.
While actively promoting children’s education, we also seek to instill values practiced by local communities. Our measure of success goes beyond conventional metrics, embracing what resonates effectively within Nepal’s rural lifestyle and infrastructural constraints. With our multifaceted approach to engage children, their families, and village leaders, we are charting a unique path to academic success for Nepal’s most disadvantaged children.
We warmly invite you to join us on this impactful journey. Your support is invaluable, whether through a donation, spreading the word, or other forms of engagement. Hundred percent of your donation goes directly into the program. The low overheads that we have are covered by volunteers and board members. We’re eager to connect with you and share more about our initiatives, the scope of our work, and our vision for positively shaping the future of our children.
ENC’s help-Nepal operations began in the Fall of 2012 with the goal of elevating support for education for poor children in Nepal more strongly than ever before. SETCO has been our partner organization in Nepal, active for about 20 years now in funding scholarships to the poorest kids. A majority of our kids are from the Tamang community around the broader Bhattedanda-Pyutar areas across the Lalitpur district, studying at eleven schools. Together we have built a house (SETCO Learning Center) at Bhattedanda, which has allowed the local school, Satkanya, to use it for teaching students in two classes, kindergarten, and first grade, temporarily. The school is expanding but currently lacks enough physical facilities for holding all of its classes.
ENC has been providing funds for student learning programs, of which need-based scholarship remains the largest. Cash and in-kind (clothing, shoes, bags, stationery) scholarships form a majority of ENC support, though in recent years personality development training (PDT) has also received some help.
ENC along with its partner organization (SETCO) has been working to support its primary mission to support children on the verge of being deprived of education because of poverty. ENC/SETCO together have increased sponsorship to over 125 children now and, with greater support from its donor base, plans to raise the number to about 100 over the next year or two.
“Over 90% of these kids are from Dalit communities and a majority are female”.
Few employees work across the school area to monitor students’ attendance at school as well as their academics. SETCO officials also conduct periodic monitoring of their own including regular consultations with school principals and other teachers.
Once selected, on the basis of ENC/SETCO’s set criteria such as deep poverty, disadvantaged group, preference for girls, and parents’ commitment to their children’s success, the student receives a scholarship from grade 1 through 12 depending on the age of the kid at which the selection occurred. The cash scholarship for all the sponsored students at a school is directly deposited at the school’s bank account to maximize transparency. The school then distributes the money to the parent/guardian in the presence of the student. Our goal has been to increase funds since the need is immense in terms of scholarships as well as the PDT (for 20-25 students during one training period).
SETCO maintains its monitoring of the education of our children on a regular basis. With ENC’s support, SETCO has built a small house named SSN (Shiva Maya Shanti Niketan) which works as a learning center for our sponsored children.