Poverty isn’t just about a lack of money – the impoverished communities we support in southern Nepal face many overlapping challenges that affect their daily lives. These include finding decent jobs, accessing financial support, and securing quality education and healthcare. The rural-urban dividecontinues to limit opportunities, with cities offering more services but at a higher cost. In the south, social barriers like gender, caste, religion, and ethnicity make progress even harder.

Now, with a global financial crisis seeing food banks springing up even in wealthy countries, life has become much tougher for those already living hand-to-mouth in Nepal. Prices of essentials – food, fuel, medicine – have soared, but incomes haven’t kept up. Many who depend on farming are hit twice: earning less and losing what little they have to crop failures, livestock loss, and disasters driven by climate change.

Worst of all, people who have always struggled to find their way out of a poverty trap find themselves in a climate trap from a crisis they didn’t cause. Unlike the wealthy, they can’t afford to move or adapt. They’re forced to stay where they are – and somehow survive.