2000 – 2020
Saipu School
The construction of the Saipu village school in Ramechhap district was the first project undertaken by Kam For Sud and marked the beginning of a fruitful partnership with the Saipu community that has lasted twenty years.
From the earliest stages of planning, the main objective has been to ensure access to schooling for all children in Saipu, particularly girls and pupils belonging to the lowest castes. A key aspect was the active participation of local people in all stages of the project: from planning to the practical work of building and then running the school.
With the exception of a few bags of cement and very few other products, the school was built with local materials (stone and wood) and through the labor of many Saipu men.
In this way, almost all of the expenditure was invested in the village itself, allowing many migrant worker families to stay together for an entire year. The locally invested capital also enabled the development of a certain village micro-economy.
The construction of toilets with running water served the dual purpose of making toilets available to the students and serving as a model for the construction of similar facilities in the village.
In April 2000 the new school in Saipu was inaugurated, which is spacious, bright and equipped with toilets with running water. A small library with books in Nepali and English is available to pupils, while a large meeting hall, as well as the forecourt in front of the school, are used for community meetings and activities.
The school accommodates three hundred pupils and offers a schooling program up to 10th grade; at least half of the pupils are girls. Progressively, responsibility for teachers’ salaries was transferred to the Nepalese government.
Educational support for teachers
Kam For Sud later promoted an educational program to try to improve the quality of teaching, which was traditionally based on choral repetition rather than real comprehension or autonomous search for solutions by learners. From math to languages, from science to history, everything was simply recited from memory, in chorus, learning to react automatically to certain questions.
The objective of the teaching program was to propose more modern teaching methods and awaken new potentials in the dynamics of knowledge transmission at school. The program was carried out by several Swiss teachers, volunteers and civilians, who each stayed six months in Saipu between 2009 and 2013.
The 2015 earthquake damaged the school, which was rebuilt as part of the village reconstruction project along with other public facilities and the nearly nine hundred houses in the Saipu district.
