active· Livelihoods

F.a: Encouraging Sustainable Livelihood of Marginalised Farmers in Rural Nepal

Nepal has been supplying 1500 unskilled youth per day for foreign labour work. This very popular youth (majority male) out-migration has resulted feminization of agriculture in the villages of Nepal. Also, a huge amount of farmland has been abandoned, and the remaining women farmers have moved away from multi crops / multi plants tradition to single crops / single plant practices in the name of commercialization of farming. That is how rural Nepal has been being converted from biodiversity friendly places t o a completely different farmland. In this project aim is to advance following issues: #- Advance discussion on the importance of maintaining biodiversity #- Facilitate newly emerged women farmers to understand sustainable livelihood and benefits in mainta ining biodiversity while doing farming.#- Let rural youths to have comparative perspectives of out-migration for similar unskilled jobs vs. continue doing farming in the village #- Facilitate understanding of newly elected leadership about the above mentio ned themes. #- Engage with other CBOs in the line of open space to popularise alternative ideas, plans and policies. #Following activities are planned:# Avail platform for rural women farmers to understand benefits of maintaining biodiversity for the hu mankind, and how it helps increasing their incomes for their own livelihood. # Engage with youths (both returnees and aspirants for out-migration without any skills) so that the aspirants know the true picture of out-migration by the returnees, that eventu ally encourages them not to go out for similar unskilled jobs but retain in the village. # Give publicity of above mentioned activities to encourage other women and youths from project uncovered areas not only by publishing newsletters, books, journal arti cles, op-ed, etc., but also by organising regional and national consortiums and networks under the banner of Nepal Social Forum, Asian Social Forum, Forum for Sustainable Development, etc. #Though the direct beneficiaries of the project will be rural wo men, youths and elected representatives of a few villages, people of Nepal will be indirectly benefited from the project.#The project is implemented by SADED-Nepal in the rural areas of Kavre, Dolakha and Nuwakot Districts. A tentative plan is to cover 19 village communities in the project. National dialogues and Social Forum related activities will be in Kathmandu and Lalitpur districts of Nepal.