Endowment:
In 2008, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Nepal SEEDS with the launch of a campaign to start our first endowment, the Nepal SEEDS Scholarship Endowment Fund.
The Endowment will create a permanent source of funds where the earnings provide scholarships to support the higher education of children, especially girls, in Nepal.
The scholarships will provide funding for higher education for these children, which for most of them is beyond their reach, but not their aspirations. Nepal SEEDS has funded scholarships from operating funds over the years and now desires to establish a long term funding source to match the long term education commitment.
In establishing our original mission, education was viewed as one of the single most important areas that could be funded by your contributions. Our research regarding the impact of education in countries like Nepal reinforced this view:
- “Educated girls become educated women - women who participate in the social, economic and political life of their nation. They are more likely to be healthy, to have smaller families and to have healthy and educated children.” – UNICEF
- An educated girl tends to marry later and have fewer children. The children she does have will be more likely to survive, they will be better nourished and better educated. When girls gain four years more education fertility per woman drops by roughly one birth. An extra year of education for girls can reduce infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent. - 100-country World Bank study (Klasen, 1999).
- “If you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.”
- A girl who has had more than six years of education is better equipped to seek and use medical and health care advice, to immunize her children, to be aware of sanitary practices from boiling water to the importance of washing hands. The children of women with just five years of school had a 40 per cent better survival rate than the children of women who had less than five years in class. – World Bank
- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it simply: "No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition, promote health, including the prevention of HIV/AIDS, and increase the chances of education for the next generation. Let us invest in women and girls."
Help us meet our goal of raising $100,000. Your support will help make it possible for these girls to follow their dreams to become doctors, nurses, or teachers in their local villages to improve the quality of life for themselves, their families and their entire communities.
We are well along on raising the targeted money.