The International Council for Friends of Nepal (ICFON) is a Dutch development aid organisation that supports Nepalese non-governmental organisations in their activities to improve the livelihood of local people in Nepal. Since 1990 ICFON has provided financial aid and advise to groups of poor and deprived people in order to help them improve their own living conditions. ICFON focuses on educational projects as we strongly believe that education can be the way to a better future and  enables improvement of living conditions. Furthermore, ICFON also supports agricultural and health projects that are initiated by poor people. Education must be available for all people, including the poor and handicapped.

One of the projects that we support is ISARD.

The Integrated Self-help Association for Rural Development (ISARD) supports several poor communities in Sindhupalchowk district by financing small agricultural and educational projects. In each project village ISARD makes an inventory of the problems that people experience and the way they would like to improve their lives. This has resulted in a small local school, several trainings sessions for income generation, introduction of new agricultural products, improvement of soil quality, improvement of the local health care system and much more… By increasing agricultural production, villagers feel less need to leave the village to search for  jobs in Kathmandu. We can proudly say that ISARDS way of working is very basic but unbelievably fruitful! We don´t build the schools for the villagers but we teach the parents about the importance of school by training them to read and write. These villagers construct the schools by themselves and we only need to support e.g. the roof, furniture and the teachers. Our microcredits have given many poor Nepalis, mainly Thami people BK and Tamang, a new future as they are not reliant anymore on loans with large interest from the rich local farmer.

Ebindra Neupane, the coordinator of ISARD, was born in the district himself and initiated ISARD in order to help the people around him to help themselves to improve their livelihoods.

I hope this example is enough reason to vote. All the money goes to Nepal, we even pay our own flights and local expenses when we work for ICFON.