EDFON
“Educational Development Foundation Nepal” is an NGO founded in 2014 that works in the educational environment of Kathmandu, with special attention to families in poverty and socio-economic difficulties.
Our mission is to make it possible for children in social exclusion in the Jarankú (Kathmadú) neighborhood to make their right to education real and effective.
EDFON has been actively involved since its inception in the promotion of free and quality education in the community of the said neighborhood, in which the population does not have easy access or is excluded from this right.
The NGO has a headquarters in Barcelona and another in Kathmandu, working in coordination on projects and work to be done.
One of our most ambitious projects is "Nepal-Ratna School" ( formerly "Nepal Catalunya school" ), an elementary school located in the Jarankhu district on the outskirts of Kathmandu. The name of the center was changed in 2016 when applying for the high school cycle license by imperative of the local authorities.
Why do we collaborate with Nepal?
Nepal is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
Despite the country's international aid, Nepali children do not have access to many of their basic rights.
They live surrounded by poverty, malnutrition, violence and many other harmful circumstances.
With 80% of the population living below the poverty line, 30% of children between the ages of 7 and 14 work in conditions of child exploitation in quarries, chopping stones or as carriers of material for in construction.
In Nepal many children die before the age of 5, mainly due to child malnutrition.
Our solidarity is motivated by the extreme poverty in which he lives in Nepal, a poverty very different from the one we know in Catalonia and in Spain. A much harder poverty and also more dangerous.
There are families of 4 to 7 members living in rooms of 10 square meters, including the kitchen and dining room.
There are families in which the father or mother is an alcoholic, in whom no parent works, and in whom they luckily have a piece of land that they use to grow survival food.
In Nepal, about 15,000 poor girls are sold to mafias in India every year because their families cannot feed them.
In Nepal there are more than 11,000 children living on the streets, sniffing glue, to alleviate hunger and cold.
"" I was impressed by the pedagogy taught at the center, very close to the Montessori method, and the structure of the building built in 2000 by Architects without Borders, with the collaboration of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
I was shocked by the lack of financial means to be able to keep the school going. And what struck me most was that the center aimed to welcome children who came from the most extreme poverty, the most disadvantaged, from different ethnic groups and lower castes, those who are socially excluded, those who if this school did not exist, they would be excluded from the most important social need for integration into society: education. "
Although the NGO was not founded until 2014, the project was born in 2012, when the president of the NGO first visited the "Nepal Catalunya School":