Since 1999, The Advocates has collaborated with community leaders and Nepali NGO Hoste Hainse to support a school for the most disadvantaged students in the Sankhu-Palubari community. The Sankhu-Palubarhi Community School, which now serves more than 300 students each year, works to prevent child labor, encourage gender parity in education, increase literacy, and improve the lives and well-being of the neediest children in the area.

This year, the school has successfully met goals for gender parity among students in both the primary and lower secondary grades. For the 2011-2012 school year, 147 of the 283 students in pre-school through eighth grade are girls. Additionally, 15 of the 31 students in ninth and tenth grade are young women.

Since the school’s founding, the teachers have conducted outreach to parents and worked hard to encourage female students to attend and stay in school in spite of societal pressure to get married or enter domestic work. Their efforts have paid off - in 2009-2010, 47.5% of the student body was female, and last year it reached 49%. While girls worldwide generally are less likely to access, remain in, or achieve in school, 52% of the students in K-8th grades at the Sankhu-Palubari Community School this year are girls. And a girl is at the top of the class in most of the grades at SPCS.

International statistics show a higher rater of violence against women in populations where women are uneducated. Providing equal access to education is a common tool to combat intimate partner violence.

Compiled from: International Center for Research on Women, Impact of Investments in Female Education on Gender Equality (27 August 2003), and McCloskey, Laura Ann et al., Gender Inequality and Intimate Partner Violence Among Women in Moshi, Tanzania, International Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 31 (September 2005).