Liberating Girls from Indentured Servitude

The innovative Indentured Daughters Program rescues girls whose families have sold them into virtual slavery. For only $100, NYOF gives each family a piglet or goat as compensation for the girl's wages and enables her to go to school, probably for the first time in her life.

Gita was just sold into bonded servitude

In the Dang District in western Nepal, many indigenous families from the Tharu ethnic group subsist as farm laborers. Unable to make ends meet, they have been forced into a desperate trade—selling their daughters to work far from home as bonded servants in private homes or as dishwashers in tea houses. Some of these children are as young as six.

Alone and far from home, these "indentured daughters" have no knowledge of the ways of city people or of other cultures, and most speak only the local dialect. Their living conditions are entirely at the discretion of their employers. The bonded girls seldom attend school and have no prospects for a decent future. Some are ultimately forced into prostitution.

Working closely with local communities, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation and its founder, Olga Murray, provide a creative, humane alternative for these families, helping them keep their daughters at home and putting the girls in school. Read on for NYOF's unconventional but effective approach....

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