Basanta Kumar Karki

The training was very useful for me as it was custom designed and gradually developed to meet the participants’ interest and requirement

Basanta holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration and a Master’s Degree in Sociology.  He currently works as the Program Coordinator of the Safer Migration Project (SaMi), a program run by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation in Nepal. As part of his role, he provides support to the project team with regards to overall project management. He also has the responsibility of looking after the access to justice and skills component of the project, as well as carrying out advocacy initiatives focusing on promotion and protection of rights of migrant workers and their families.

As an advocate for the rights of migrant workers, Basanta works with his team to develop and deliver accurate information in an effective manner. They have helped convince thousands of potential migrant workers to opt for safe migration process, to reduce the pre-departure recruitment costs, to claim justice by victimized migrants, to improve job skills and secure better earning, better family management and better use of their income.

The training didn’t only give us the theoretical knowledge and information about human rights issues but also provided useful and practical knowledge/skills about how it could be used. It provided me with practical experience on how we can advocate better using human rights framework and how we can lobby with different stakeholders to raise the issues of migrant workers

Basanta feels he gained invaluable experience from DTP’s Migrant Workers Program held in Nepal in 2013. During the training, he and others discussed issues with trainers and helped develop a new set of case documentation templates, enabling human rights violations of migrant workers to be documented in a better way. Different NGO/community partners of Basanta’s Safer Migration Project have employed these templates, which have become very instrumental in evidence-based advocacy. Basanta has also been using the skills and knowledge attained from the DTP training in his daily work for the promotion and protection of migrant workers’ rights.

One of the key advantages of the training is that it helped me a lot to establish very good relationship with the networks active in the field of migrant’s rights. It helped me to develop very close relationship with many of the CSOs and enabled to share my knowledge and experiences as well as plan together for advocacy and lobby.