Porters Progress

I first heard about Porters Progress (PP) at a Nepalese discussion evening last year. Afterwards I talked to the founder a young American guy called Ben Ayers and was fascinated to hear how, whilst visiting Nepal on a climbing trip, he was so moved by the abject poverty and exploitation that are a relentless feature of everyday life for porters working in Nepal that he felt he had to do something to help.

The organization was formed to save the lives of Nepali mountain porters and their families. It runs programs that focus upon keeping porters alive while on the trail and nourished at home. The whole ethos of the organization, is about community empowerment; helping people learn how to come up with their own ideas and solve their own problems.

Although trekking industry is a highly lucrative business there is no structure within Nepal for ensuring that the porters receive a fair return for their labour. Generally paid by the kilo, porters are forced to carry back braking loads of up to fifty kilos, often for weeks on end without any proper rest. Entirely reliant on one source of income, their labour, they have no choice but to work through sickness and exhaustion often with tragic consequences. Several porters every season die from acute mountain sickness. Similarly the pressure to earn enough to feed their families often sees porters crossing high passes or attempting technical climbs dangerously under skilled and ill equipped.

PP has developed an impressive innovative range of solutions to help combat these and other problems:

Education: The free daily language classes on offer in Kathmandu and Lukla, teach porters how to approach foreigners for assistance during an emergency, negotiate wages, get work at the trailhead and engage in basic conversation. Weekly meetings are also help them learn more about important issues such as, preventing altitude sickness, environmental awareness, basic health and hygiene, and community building.

The UN estimates that AIDS will be the leading cause of death among young adults in Nepal within 10 years. The mobility of porters makes them particularly vulnerable to the spread of the disease. In response to this, Porters' Progress has started an aggressive HIV/AIDS prevention campaign, offering monthly awareness workshops, free condom distribution, and employing porters as peer educators.

Equipment Bank: Currently, trekking companies are not required to outfit their porters with appropriate gear, clothing and shoes for the serious mountain conditions found on even the most popular trekking routes. This simple service helps porters avoid preventable tragedies on the trail. PP has built up a stockpile of equipment, such as waterproof jackets and boots, to adequately outfit over 500 porters at any one time. To use the clothing bank, porters simply have to leave a small deposit which is returned once the gear is washed and returned.

Diversity of skills: PP helps porters harness and develop other skills such as painting, writing, making handicrafts etc in an attempt to lessen their reliance on what is a dangerous, arduous and irregular trade.

Preventing Child labor: In coordination with the International Labour Organization and World Education, PP is helping to reduce the number of rural children working in the portering trade. Child porters are becoming particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infection, as well as becoming victims of the growing insurgency in Nepal.

Porters progress is always looking for volunteers to go out to Nepal and assist with their work. For information on that or anything else to do with their work they do please contact marcus@onepercentscheme.org.

Marcus Fairhurst, January 2006