Innovation

LOCWOM opened the very first women's center in Nepal. The types of services the center provides are health awareness, hygiene awareness, and a children's educational service. Each program brings awareness to women in underdeveloped parts of Nepal. The skill LOCWOM teaches every local woman is how to craft Nepali garments and accessories. From there, they then go on to learn different social entrepreneurship skills pertaining to business. The curriculum to develop the entrepreneur mindset in these women is focused on building financial literacy. Women are required to stay in their respective skills program for 6 months and receive monthly stipends to help start their financial freedom. Throughout this process, women are also informed about maintaining their health and hygiene. They are taught safe and basic feminine hygiene practices, meant to improve the health of women in the country. Being a third-world country means that there is a lot of pollution due to poverty. This poverty is what forces women into sweatshops and sparks child labor. Giving them a skill to hopefully start a business can further reduce these chances because they are encouraged apply the knowledge gained from the center into the working world. "The women can either stay in the center to aide in the education of more women or apply for a micro-finance loan to start a business," says Nasreen Sheikh, founder of LOCWOM.

According to Nasreen, only .01% of businesses in Nepal are owned by women. LOCWOM hopes to break this gender gap in the workforce through their services. Giving women the opportunity and skills to work addresses more problems than just the gender gap. By being taught sustainable practices, along with their preferred entrepreneurial skill, poverty will decrease because the women are now able to contribute to the working world in a safe and ethical manner. This in turn can drive down the need for sweatshops and child labor. The mission of LOCWOM benefits Nepal by helping to develop it into a stronger, more modern nation, free from the social and environmental injustices it faces today.

Inspiration

Surviving such brutal conditions as a female child laborer in Nepal is what drove Nasreen to start LOCWOM. When Nasreen Sheikh was young, she saw that women did not have a voice in her village. They did not have the same rights men had and were expected to basically amount to nothing. Nasreen knew something was not right. “When I arrived in the city, I became a victim of child labor and I survived that. It was like a one in a million chance of surviving and that was the case for me. So many died due to poor conditions. Our main source of water was heavily polluted and we could not grow fruits such as oranges due to how bad the land was. You worked such long hours and barely made a dollar by the end the day.” Being forced to work in that sweatshop is what engrained a brutal picture in Nasreen’s head. While working in the city, their main water source resembled more of a floating garbage patch than a river. The waste in the river ranged from sweatshop scraps, human waste, and assorted excrements. By surviving such insurmountable odds, Nasreen hopes to educate women so that they may contribute to the Nepali society and extinguish the atrocities that have been the norm for too long. Never again will a woman or child have to be forced into labor under such horrendous conditions.

Overall impact

Women feel much more empowered after attending the courses offered at the Kathmandu women's center. "I see many women coming to the center for the first time who won't even look at you. After our courses, they are completely changed. They have a strong sense of independence and want to do something better." What LOCWOM are doing for these women is revolutionary in Nepal. Women no longer have to fear being forced in labor if they have a skill that is much more sustainable for developing a nation. These services are changing the futures of women and children and are giving them hope.

Not only are Nepali women gaining confidence, but their eyes are being opened by the knowledge they are gaining. "We have volunteer instructors from all around the world. With them, they bring sustainable practices such as recycling, organic fabrics sewing, and health awareness." The employees give these women a diverse array of knowledge from different countries. This is powerful because it snaps the stigma in the Nepali women's heads that forced labor is the only option for them. This forced labor is all they knew from a young age. Now, these women know they are worth so much more due to the different morals taught to them by these instructors. The variety of knowledge obtained through LOCWOM has opened the eyes of these women. They now have a better understanding on how the rest of the world works and pass those morals on to everyone they encounter in order to fix a crippled society that embraces social and environmental atrocities in the workplace.

Business benefit

Since this is the first women's center in Nepal, LOCWOM is revolutionizing the way women are seen in the eyes of the society. There has been positive reception on what LOCWOM is doing for these women. By creating this completely new way of teaching, women and children now have hope. Through the education LOCWOM provides, Nepal will be able to advance as a nation. They think forced labor is the only option, but that is because that is what they were told from a young age. LOCWOM benefits from all the good their students do when they finish their respective program. By giving these women skills to run businesses, they are able to employ more people, reducing poverty, pollution, and gender inequalities.

The innovation also benefits LOCWOM through increased interest in their programs. "More and more women want to learn, but we can only provide for so many women at a time." This influx of interested women in LOCWOM's original women's center in Kathmandu is what enabled them to begin construction on a second women's center in an isolated village on the Nepal-India border. The reception from these women has been crucial in growing LOCWOM's success. They are able to quickly implement the skills and knowledge they have obtained into real world scenarios.

Social and environmental benefit

The services that LOCWOM provides for women now gives them a voice in Nepal. "I started LOCWOM in hopes of giving a voice to these women. A voice I never had growing up," says Nasreen Sheikh. With this new found voice, women are now able to break these societal norms in Nepal that degrade women and put them at a lower level compared to men. With their new found knowledge and skills, these women can now open up businesses that value the sustainable principles taught to them.

LOCWOM has also addressed the state of Nepal's environment through their courses. They base their courses and projects around sustainability. They locally source all of their materials for projects as best as they can. It shows the women that the environment gives more when it is clean. Since pollution is very common in Nepal due to poverty, the land is often seen as nothing, but a disaster. Contaminated water sources, dying crops, you cannot do much with that. What LOCWOM has done is change the mindsets of these women. The women now have a better understanding on how to take care of the land, reducing pollution because they now see what it can provide for them.

What LOCWOM is doing to Nepal's society can also be applied to the rest of the world. Much like how Nasreen found flaws in Nepal's work system, corporations worldwide must realize their flaws as fast as possible. Corporations must strive for something worth working for. "Corporations must take action. There are already so many ideas out there, but what we really need to do is work." Societies will become much better places if corporations can come together to address their weak points and reform them. If this change is occurring in a less-developed nation such as Nepal, it can occur anywhere. "It all starts by giving people the basic human rights." If corporations can do that, people will be more willing to work for something greater than them. That is exactly what LOCWOM has done for the women of Nepal. LOCWOM unlocked the potential inside of these women and these women will soon do the same to Nepal.

Interview

Nasreen Sheikh, Founder