Community Action Nepal

Who we are

Community Action Nepal is a UK based charity whose aim is to help some of the poorest people on the planet – the mountain people of Nepal. It helps local communities to raise their standard of living and strengthen indigenous, community-based cultures. We have a proven track record improving the standard of living in remote mountain communities, delivering anti-poverty initiatives and advancing health care in Nepal over the past 25 years.

Our culture and values

Mission:

CAN works in partnership with local people to deliver anti-poverty initiatives tosupport health, education, income generation initiatives and porter welfare, with all our work underpinned by community development principles. We aim to reduce poverty, promote health and education, enhance livelihoods and improve food security, thereby contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable DevelopmentGoals.

Values
Serving rural communities: CAN operates in remote mountain communities ‘off thebeaten track’ in northern Nepal beyond the road heads, mainly near the border withTibet.
Strengthening local communities and reducing rural depopulation: CAN supports a range of health, education and livelihood interventions and actively seeks to improve the standard of living in remote mountain communities to help to reverse the de-population of the upper Himalaya.
Promoting self reliance: CAN supports mountain communities by helping them to help themselves to become self reliant. Examples of this include a number of incomegeneration projects (e.g. fish farms, market gardens, mushroom and cardamomproduction, craft goods made from local materials, trekking co-operatives, etc).
Community driven and needs led: Our work is totally driven by the needs of the mountain people of Nepal. CAN only provides focussed support where it is neededand reasonably asked for. From the beginning, CAN has only responded to requests for support after receiving a determined petition for help from communities in the remote areas of Nepal.CAN’s work is community driven and opposes donordependency.
Clarity about roles and responsibilities: When CAN pledges to support a project it works with local people to clearly define and agree each partner’s roles andresponsibilities and define the mutual expectations. We do this by developing apartnership agreement. This is a key foundation stone of successful collaboration.

Local ownership, participation and locally led solutions: CAN will only start aproject when the community has formed a project committee with a Chairpersonwho is fully committed to CAN’s ethos. CAN encourages these local committees to take ownership of the development, running and maintenance of each project bysharing their skills and local knowledge. CAN UK undertakes to work in Nepal as unobtrusively as possible.
Community contribution: To avoid donor dependency and to encourage a local sense of ownership and responsibility in all projects, CAN encourages the activeinvolvement and commitment of villagers in any capital project we support. CANNepal asks villagers to provide 'shramdan' by contributing up to a third of the capital costs ‘in kind’, by providing their labour, expertise, and local materials.
Financially transparent: CAN has a policy of financial transparency and publically highlights the costs of any new project and how it has been funded in partner villages. At the end of each project year, CAN staff undertake a community audit in beneficiary communities identifying project activities, outcomes, costs includingincome and expenditure. CAN will stop a project or withdraw altogether if there are unresolved financial irregularities. CAN also believes in paying local rates and ensures that projects deliver value for money.

Accountable: CAN encourages partner communities to air their views, concerns and criticisms and we try to resolve any complaints directly in situ. We have established a number of mechanisms to do this including the project Committees, complaints procedures and feedback systems.
Inclusive: CAN works with individuals and communities irrespective of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion and beliefs, disability and caste. CAN recognises the barriers that excluded groups can face and takes pro-active action to combat discriminatory practices.
Impactful: CAN aims to make a difference to the lives of mountain people. As well asproviding inputs and delivering activities we aim to demonstrate that what we do generates outcome-based change and is effective. We try to capture this in our monitoring reporting. When the Government of Nepal asks for our help to work in a specific area we seek to concentrate a range interventions in a focussedgeographical area to maximise impact.

Sustainable: CAN aims to ensure that all of our projects are set up on a sustainable scale. In doing so CAN's Operations team and Trustees have a good understanding of each project and can stay fully informed of developments and can prevent anomalies escalating out of control. CAN will provide support for as long as it takes to support projects to be fully sustainable with small projects having a greater chance of being sustained by the community itself or by local government. There are good examples that this approach is effective with CAN handing over the running of many projects to local people and their local governmentadministrations in recent years. When CAN withdraws from a project we maintainongoing links and will actively help where contingencies arise.

Equality, diversity and inclusion policy

Community Action Nepal recognises that we live in a society where discrimination still operates to the disadvantage of many groups in society and the Charity is committed to the principle that no employee, job applicant or volunteer shall receive unfavourable treatment on the grounds of age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, pregnancy or maternity, marital status or civil partnership, race, religious beliefs, sex, sexual orientation or for any other reason that can be objectively justified.