Volunteering with PHASE

As our name “Practical Help Achieving Self Empowerment” suggests, we truly want to assist the remote and forgotten communities in rural Nepal in achieving more self reliance and more control over their lives. One important part of this is demonstrating to them during our work that Nepalese citizens can work for the development of their own country, if given the opportunity.

This means that, wherever possible, we want to try and enable qualified Nepalese staff to do any work on the ground.
To explain and illustrate this point: imagine a UK nurse going into a remote village as a volunteer: not only does she need someone to help translate, and will not be able to communicate very effectively even then, but also her presence and work will reinforce the villagers’ perception that their own governmental health system does not work and that they can only get any service through the charitable help of foreigners. By contrast, if we enable a female Nepalese health worker to work in the governmental health post, at the same time as providing important health services she can also serve as a role model to young girls in the village, who can see in real life that they have other alternatives in their lives than early marriage or prostitution…

Teaching Session with Health Workers

Having said all that, we do support our Nepalese partners with training and logistic support as well: At present, two experienced GPs, Dr Gerda Pohl and Dr Andrew Ferguson, regularly travel to Nepal for in post supervision and training of health workers, and there is scope for more GPs to help with this. Go here for more information.

The Cervical Cancer Cooperation now involves a group of seven UK professionals who travel to Nepal repeatedly.

Other volunteer positions come up occasionally as required: For example, Samantha Watson has just spent 6 weeks in Nepal for us, researching how our school link programme can become more effective, and Maga Kijak has given general IT support to the Kathmandu office.

Please contact us if you would like to get involved.