About NYOF:
Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation has been engaged in liberating these girls since 2000. Since that time, NYOF has freed over 2500 girls in the Deukhuri Valley of the Dang District, one of the five in which the custom is prevalent, placed them in school, and compensated their parents for the lost wages by giving them a piglet or goat. (Another foundation rescued another 1500 girls after we trained them in our methods.) The families raise the animal on kitchen scraps and can sell it at the end of the year for the same amount or more than they received for their daughters' labor. Other incentives, such as toothbrushes, soap, a kerosene lamp (and two liters of kerosene a month to provide light for the girls to study at night) are also provided. NYOF places the girls in school at its own expense.
One of the first girls we freed from bondage is now in college and is one of the primary activists in her community against the bonding custom.
Simultaneously, we conduct a very energetic awareness campaign to turn the community against the practice of indentured servitude. Street plays written and performed by the returned girls themselves, in which they act out the hardships they were forced to undergo (most of the population is illiterate), posters, leaflets, a radio program on Sunday night in which returned girls talk about their hardships as bonded servants, lawsuits against employers who refuse to release the girls from their contracts after they have been notified that it is illegal, and many other activities.
Last January, we freed an additional 400 girls in the Dang District and are close to eradicating the custom there. Our aim it so eradicate the custom in all the four remaining districts where it exists. Although there are no reliable figures, it is estimated that about 15,000-20,000 girls are bonded away each year.
