By Tikaram Upreti, Jhapa, Mar. 8: Enter the office of Damak Municipality-10, and in a room you see some single-women applying ahdesive in shoes' soles while others cutting the footwear's soles.

A few of them are also sewing shoes in the stitchimg machine. It looks the ward office is running a shoe factory !

But, it is a shoe making training for some representative single-women of all the wards of the muncipality.

The single women have been participating in the cobbler training under the plan of making the women who have lost their husbands self-reliant.  

Numa Kafle, a resident of Damak Municipality-1 was widowed when she was 25 years old. Her husband left her for ever with two toddlers.

“Along with the sorrow of my husband’s death, the responsibility of taking care of my two children alone had veiled me at an early age,” Kafle said.

She shared that being a single woman was challenging due to the ill-treatment meted out to her by her family and neighbours.

After the demise of her husband, Kafle didn’t have any source of income to sustain the family. The income from farming was not sufficient to run the home.

“I opted for livestock farming to educate my children, I had been running the house and raising my children in utmost difficulty” she said.

Kafle has been receiving cobbler training for two weeks.  

She said that she had planned of establishing her own shoe factory after completion of training.

“This employment-generating training has definitely boosted my morale to start something on my own,” added Kafle.

Likewise, Hemantaa Ghimire of Damak-6, Rina Bhattarai of Damak-5, Shrijana Rimal, Ambika Shrestha and so forth have been receiving the cobbler training in the municipality office.

The municipality had selected 10 female representatives from all 10 wards of Damak Municipaltiy to provide cobbler training for first and second phase, informed Gita Adhikari, Deputy Mayor of the Municipality.

Local trainer, Tirtha Bisanke, has been providing the training to single women.

The participants have been receiving the training with great enthusiasm, Bisanke said.

In the first phase, the municipality had provided trainings to make reusable sanitary pads.

The municipality had introduced the plan to make the single women self-reliant through the production of useful and affordable reusable pads.  

Deputy Mayor Adhikari said that the municipality would provide a separate training for single women every fiscal year.

Adhikari said that the training was given to empower women in entrepreneurship.