Since its creation in 1983, The Advocates for Human Rights has carried out a variety of campaigns geared towards specific human rights issues, including human trafficking, biases towards immigrants, violence against women, and child labor. While such projects are useful at identifying and calling attention to human rights concerns around the world, the campaign to stop the use of child labor went one step further. In 1999, the staff and volunteers at The Advocates for Human Rights decided to directly combat child labor by founding a school for children who would otherwise be forced to work.

Longtime The Advocates volunteer David Parker, who had helped the organization publicize the issue through his compelling photography of child laborers, suggested that The Advocates look as far away as Nepal, where an astonishing number of children are fully employed, in order to tackle the problem where it started: with children, within families, among communities. To learn more about child labor in Nepal, please click here.

Partnering with Hoste Hainse, a Nepalese non-profit that runs schools for poor children who otherwise might be forced to work, The Advocates for Human Rights created the Sankhu-Palubari Community School Project in 1999. To find out more about the School, please click here.

Students at Sankhu-Palubari Community School.

The Advocates' Child Labor Committee works with a coalition of individual volunteers, organizations, and concerned others in order to financially sustain the Sankhu-Palubari Community School. Local school groups in Minnesota also collect school supplies and organize fundraisers to benefit the Sankhu-Palubari Community School in Nepal. Join us in supporting the Sankhu-Palubari Community School Project by sending your donations here (direct your payment to "Sankhu School"). To find out more about the project, or to learn how you or your organization can sponsor a student’s education, please contact Colleen Beebe.

Due to a civil war in Nepal that has lasted for more than nine years, many schools in Nepal have been shut down. Now, in 2005, the education of Nepalese children is threatened not only by child labor, but by the side effects of war. Tens of thousands of Nepalese children have been abducted by warring parties and forced to serve as child soldiers. Other children who might attend school are kept home in order to avoid such abductions, thus contributing to a

The Advocates visits the Sankhu-Palubari Community School

overall decline in the number of children attending school in Nepal. School buildings themselves have been targeted in the fighting between government and Maoist troops, and many school teachers have been tortured, killed, or forced into supporting one side or another. To find out more about the situation, see Amnesty International’s Nepal Country Page.

Now, more than ever, Sankhu-Palubari Community School provides an important service to the children of Nepal. Please consider sponsoring the Sankhu-Palubari Community School through The Advocates for Human Rights. To donate, click here (direct your payment to "Sankhu School").

To find out more about the current situation in Nepal, please follow the sidebar links.