Photo: Home Net South Asia
Nepal
Home-based work is an important source of employment for women in Nepal. These women are mostly engaged in knitting, weaving and stitching and are often linked with global supply chains.
Homeworkers in Nepal are subjected to very low wages, lack of social security and social protection facilities and irregular work.
The Hidden Homeworker programme in Nepal is working with two local partners, SABAH Nepal and CLASS Nepal in three districts of Kathmandu valley — Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur —and Sankhuwasabha district.
SABAH Nepal
Under the Hidden Homeworker project, SABAH Nepal has supported women home-based workers engaged in knitting, weaving, tailoring, and stitching, with livelihood generation and re-skilling them when during the pandemic there wasn’t much garment work available.
They also provided homeworkers training on record-keeping, violence against women, financial literacy and organisational health and safety.
SABAH Nepal has its own women economic empowerment model rooted in a value chain approach where they organise and capacitate general producers and upgrade them to entrepreneur level, ensuring direct access to market.
SABAH Nepal provides technical skills to develop market-oriented products and services for primary actors, which will build on the existing technical skills of the beneficiaries to produce finished products that can directly be linked to the existing local, regional and global supply chain.
SABAH Nepal also provides digital literacy to the homeworkers so they can directly sell their products online.
SABAH Nepal (SAARC Business Association for Home-Based Workers Nepal) is a community based social-business organisation which works towards strengthening the livelihoods of financially deprived and marginalised excluded and vulnerable women of Nepal.
Photo: Home Net South Asia
CLASS NEPAL
Under the Hidden Homeworker project CLASS Nepal works to draft a home-based workers policy for Nepal and set up national policy forums to discuss the policy with key stakeholders such as local government, trade unions, NGOs, CSO, and home-based workers.
They coordinate with ILO to advocate for the ratification of C177 and build momentum for the need of a home-based workers policy.
Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS Nepal) is a non-profit making and non-governmental organisation working for social transformation by promoting social justice and community awareness on human rights.
It works closely with the labour organisations for labour rights through labour education, advocacy, awareness, capacity building and research activities.
CLASS Nepal has been directly and closely working with home-based workers for their rights and entitlements since 2012.
