Building change from the ground up

Growing up surrounded by discussions of social justice, Aishworya Shrestha, a Nepali social worker and PhD student at Columbia University, was inspired by her parents' activism to address inequality.

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I grew up knowing that not everyone had the same opportunities.

Shrestha's fieldwork across Nepal revealed the interconnected nature of social issues. She observed that problems like poor school performance were often linked to deeper issues such as hunger, domestic violence, parental migration, or lack of household income. This realization became the bedrock for founding Heart of Nepal in 2020.

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Everywhere I went, I kept seeing the same thing. I would meet a child who was struggling in school, but the issue was not really education. The family was hungry. Or the mother was experiencing violence. Or the parents had migrated for work. Or there was no income coming into the household. The more I travelled, the more I realised that social problems are deeply interconnected.

Heart of Nepal employs community-led strategies to bolster education, nutrition, livelihoods, women's leadership, and child protection in four wards of Indrawati Rural Municipality. Shrestha highlights that communities often possess the knowledge and ideas to solve their own problems but are frequently denied the necessary resources, opportunities, and decision-making power.

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Most communities already know their problems and often have ideas about how to address them. What they are too often denied is resources, opportunities, and decision-making power.

Shrestha's work intersects social justice, gender equality, and systems change. She advocates for placing individuals closest to a problem at the forefront of solution design. Heart of Nepal's approach challenges conventional development programs that categorize people by single identities, instead focusing on intersectionality to ensure no one is left behind.

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Too often, development programmes categorise people into single identities and overlook these complexities. Intersectionality challenges us to ask who is being left behind even within groups.