SFN

Solidarity France Nepal (SFN) is a Nepalese-French NGO created in 1995 by Tristan Lecomte. Then a student of HEC Paris, Tristan fell in love with Nepal and felt that a lot could be done to help Nepali villages with a little bit of money and some imagination. Tristan then went on to create Alter Eco and was named among the 100 most influential persons on earth by Time Magazine in 2010… Since then and thanks to the efforts of its Nepalese president Pramod Khakurel, SFN has grown as well and now sends around 50 students every year to help organize and finance projects in small villages of Nepal. The philosophy behind those interventions is always to promote a development of Nepal by Nepalese themselves and to encourage local entrepreneurship. The projects developed by SFN thus can vary greatly from one village to another. It can go from building libraries or financing one teacher’s salary to pig keeping projects or sewing workshops. One great accomplishment took place in 2008 during my first visit in Nepal when three students helped a cheese factory to go back into production. By organizing meetings between the producers of cheese and local farmers, they were able to convince everyone to start working together again, without having to spend a single dollar. Today the annual production of cheese is 32 Tons and the whole village benefits from this renewed activity. In my eyes this is a great example of how foreign advice can help overcome problems that often come from internal conflicts and political issues. However, long lasting successes like this one can sometimes be hard to establish without yearlong support from SFN. The solution in the past years has been to establish local cooperatives with a highly motivated board that can provide support to its members. In Bhimkori, the cooperative reached more than 100 members in one year!

This year we plan to use this cooperative to help develop jam production in this village. Thousands of trees produce great plums that are left to rotten on the ground. The absence of road makes it almost impossible to transport the fruits to nearby cities so we feel producing jam locally could be a great solution. We will first have to find the correct recipe and then teach villagers how to produce a healthy jam. Then a tricky job will be to help them find a market for their production in Kathmandu…To be continued!