Gauri’s Story – International Women’s Day 2022

Gauri was married off at just 13 years of age.

Living in rural Nepal, this is sadly the case for far too many girls just like Gauri. Widespread poverty forces parents’ hands to either marry their children off or be left with another mouth they cannot feed. But with girls married off at such a young age, they often don’t know their rights, let alone how to exercise them. And as such, girls like Gauri never have the opportunity to learn about concepts like gender equality and gender-based violence.

At 27 years of age, Gauri had the opportunity to participate in her local ADRA farmer group program. This project is supported by the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP). Through this program, not only is Gauri learning more about income generation and enterprises, but she has been given the opportunity to learn about the things she was never taught as a girl. After the advocacy campaigns facilitated by ADRA, Gauri was motivated to work in human rights and to stand up against violence. Now Gauri is working as a Women’s Activist through her village’s ADRA’s project, helping to facilitate gender equality activities and efforts to prevent gender-based violence. Gauri is also involved in the municipality level Gender-Based Violence control network in two districts.

“I learned and understand them about legal provision against women and domestic violence,” Gauri says. “The training helped me to report and to resolve violence cases tactfully.”

She is advocating for the promotion of human rights, child rights, and the ending violence against women. So far, Gauri has facilitated five incidents of gender inequality, including referring cases to the municipal judiciary committee for further processing.

“In our society women are engaged in household activities for almost 18 hours a day but are considered as underemployed or unemployed,” Gauri says. “Women are victimised in family and society because they are limited to household chores; women are not given decision make role use of financial resources mobilisation. Seeing this, I decided to dedicate myself to disseminating these initiatives widely to control the violence against women and domestic violence by mobilising Women Activists.”

This International Women’s Day, we are called to #BreakTheBias that perpetuates gender inequality. We celebrate women like Gauri who are proactively working to make their world a safer and more equitable place for girls and women.

#PartnershipsForRecovery #ANCP #IWD2022