By Riya Basnet
I was lucky to work for the Students For Liberty (SFL) for three years, which exposed me to amazing ideas and people. I initiated a women entrepreneurship bootcamp through SFL’s generous support for conflict-impacted single women and travelled across Nepal. The bootcamp brought 250 women in one platform in 2014, and this helped me understand the value of creating economic space for women in difficult socio-economic settings like ours. The space I created helped them build their lives.
Nepal had a decade-long (1996-2006) conflict, and 17,000 innocent people lost their lives, the whereabouts of 1,300 people is still unknown. The families of the victims are waiting for justice.
I wanted to create a digital human rights platform to preserve the memories of the war. In 2019, I initiated One Voice Nepal (OVN) –a digital platform that video-documents stories of the conflict victims. This is an attempt to keep alive the memories of those lost in the fog of war. I released five documentaries of the families of the disappeared in December 2020. I documented the lives of five families whose loved ones disappeared during the war.
OVN’s first project Harayeka Jiban (Lost Lives) travelled across Nepal and documented the stories of the individuals who were forcefully disappeared during Nepal’s conflict. The platform will continue to tell the stories of the families of the disappeared, and how they are working to keep alive the memories of their loved ones.
Link to the documentary
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCob10V4fvkZdVloU5xSi01A?view_as=subscriber
Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/onevoicenepal1
