Nepal: Giving Prison Kids a Second Chance

Handprints at the Early Childhood Development Center

Just a few hours before flying out of Kathmandu, I met up with Luna and fought through some intense traffic to visit one of her ChangeFusion fellows' operations. When Luna found out that I had spent some time working in prisons, she insisted that I make time to visit Pushpa Basnet's Early Childhood Development Center. Looking back, I could not have found a better way to spend my last day in Nepal.

(ZOMG ALL THE PICTURES OF KIDS)

Pushpa was out of town for a conference in Japan, but her Early Childhood Development Center was humming along just fine without her. Outside the house, several children were gleefully and loudly playing with kites and balls. Off to the corner I spotted two young kids bent intently over an exercise book. The younger one was carefully copying the English word "cow" on a grid. Her name was Sanumaya, she was five years old, and she had been at the ECDC since before her first birthday. Sanumaya's mother is from a rural village in Nepal and was imprisoned for accidentally killing her father while defending herself and her daughter from domestic abuse. She was released from prison a few months ago but had nowhere to go as her village would not take her back. As a solution, Pushpa hired her to work as a live-in nanny at the Development Center, where she now does housework and acts as a surrogate mother for all of the other children Pushpa has rescued from the prison system.

Sanumaya holding her homework

Pushpa started the Early Childhood Development Center when she was just 20 after visiting a Nepali prison for her college social science class. In Nepal, children without extended families willing to take them in had to stay with their mothers in the prisons until they were 16. These children were being deprived of their childhoods and educations for crimes they had no role in committing, and a shocked Pushpa immediately went to work establishing a center where the children could live in a healthier environment and have an opportunity to attend the schools. For the first 6 years, Pushpa's center was funded entirely by charitable donations, and she actually first approached Luna to ask for more such funds. Luna convinced Pushpa that the Center needed to be self-sustainable if it was to operate in the long-term, and Pushpa became one of the 5 initial ChangeFusion fellows.

The huge rice cooker that feeds the whole house

One of the bedrooms at the ECDC

With Luna and ChangeFusion's help, Pushpa came up with the idea of having the mothers produce crafts to sell to fund their children's education and living expenses. This gave the mothers an occupation within the prisons that would directly contribute to their children's well-being, and was even a viable way to make money after they got out of prison. Within a year of receiving the seed funding and mentoring from ChangeFusion, the ECDC now makes more than enough to sustain its 33 children, ranging from 2-16 years old, and 5 full-time staff, 2 of whom live at the house. The house has "graduated" two alumni whose mothers have finished their sentences, but Pushpa will continue to check in on them and financially support their education until they graduate from high school. The mothers, incidentally, both now work full-time at the craft center located on the first floor of the house.

An ECDC employee makes Christmas cards at the craft center

Slowly and steadily, Pushpa is expanding her operations to increase the number of children she can help: she has set up a preschool near the prisons where children too young to be living separately from their mothers can go during the day, escorted by an ECDC staff out of the prison in the morning and back in the afternoon. Once there is more money, she hopes to build another house to be able to accommodate even more children, including perhaps some from the prisons outside of Kathmandu. Every month, Pushpa takes the kids to visit their mothers in the prisons, and local businesses have started offering in-kind donations for the kids so they can go out to nice restaurants and fun events. Donors are still providing her with some funds to expand, but she no longer has to worry about fundraising to sustain her core operations. Acclaim for her Center continues to pour in from local and global press, and she's been recognized many times as a leading social entrepreneur in the region. But, of course, none of that beats this view:

Just a few of the ECDC's happy residents hamming it up

Pushpa is currently looking for product designers and website gurus to help her grow her business further. If you can, help support this awesome venture in whatever creative way you can! For our part, we're supporting the next cycle of ChangeFusion fellows to help find and mentor other young entrepreneurs just like Pushpa!