![](/img/hero.png)
National Indigenous Women Forum (NIWF) has been working with Indigenous Women to protect and promote their rights over resources, traditional knowledge and skills, and culture and traditions. NIWF has been working with Indigenous Women from various Indigenous Communities to conduct livelihood upliftment activities. With the growing demand, NIWF facilitated the process of upgrading the successful livelihood cases to entrepreneurship and collective enterprise, especially among resource-poor Indigenous Communities with the support of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2023. NIWF has been undertaking different interventions to promote natural resource-based enterprises for forest-dwelling communities. The activities aim to scale up the current ongoing practices identified as good practices. Through IUCN, NIWF worked with the Bankariya (Manhari, Makwanpur), Chepang (Manahari, Makwanpur), Tharu (Kapilvastu), Danuwar (Panchkahl, Kavre) Community.
With IUCN's support NIWF Conducted trainings on:
- Financial literacy for Women representatives from producer groups of the Bankariya, Chepang, Tharu, and Danuwar Communities
- Developed business plans and product diversification plan for Women-led enterprises in Tharu (Bamboo based products), Bankariya (NTFP-collectors, Soap), Danuwar (Vegetable-based pickle) and Chepang (Soap).
- NIWF also conducted workshops on leadership-building skills along with VGGT (Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure).
Through this one year project NIWF focused on socioeconomic and institutional capacity building of the Indigenous Women group and their production and processing enterprises, securing tenure, building their financial and business capabilities to make the producer group and their communities resilient. NIWF enhanced the awareness and capacity of the Women’s producer group of the Indigenous Community and their local government and relevant stakeholders on the importance of promoting Indigenous Peoples’ skills and knowledge. The project concluded successfully in January 2024, profoundly transforming the lives of the Indigenous Women groups.