Brief Description of COPPADES’ mission:
The mission of Committee for the Promotion of Public Awareness and Development Studies (COPPADES) is to create an equitable society by uplifting the socio-economic conditions of the rural poor and discriminated groups of people to make development sustainable which becomes a key to social justice.

Approach towards achieving its mission:
COPPADES promotes organizational activities among the poorest, the underprivileged and the discriminated groups by building up awareness among them and empowering them through the provision of educational and informational facilities and so contributing to their efforts towards economic self-dependence.

COPPADES:
COPPADES www.interconnection.org/coppades is a non-profit, non-governmental social development organization with its activities in the rural areas of Nepal. For the last ten years, its focus has been on the empowerment of the poorest and the discriminated and on building self-reliance among the people in the more poor and remote parts of Nepal. One important step of COPPADES since last year has been to bring the computer and information technology widely in our country, Nepal. In this effort COPPADES leading a national consortium of NGOs of which the following are the members. All these are non-profit, non-governmental organizations working if their respective districts and are involved in various social development activities.

These consortium members are:
a. Educational Society Tanahun, Tanhun
b. Rural Development Service Center (RDSC), Tanhun
c. Gorkha Gaurav Pratisthan, Gorkha
d. Rural Environment and Development Association (REDA), Dhading
e. Rural Dynamic Group, Bajura
f. Friends of Solukhumbu, Solukhumbu

Discuss your organization’s programs for realizing its mission.
The programs of COPPADES are targeted towards organizational capacity building of beneficiary participants, literacy and awareness creation and generating empowerment and creating self-reliance among women, the poorest and the discriminated groups. The activities include training for preparing annual plans; project planning programs; provision of advanced health education; advocacy and gender balance training; strengthening of rural savings and credit cooperatives through trainings such as book-keeping, institutional promotion management, enterprise development, office management; running community libraries; construction of permanent toilets and interaction and exchange programs. Through the savings and credit groups, co-operatives and awareness building activities implemented under Rural Literacy and Self Reliance Program (RLSRP) COPPADES aims to free people from the vicious cycle of indebtedness which is the cause of much of the poverty in the rural areas in Nepal and through the implementation of Nepal ICT Project in collaboration with World Computer Exchange www.worldcomputerexchange.org and consortium member NGOs COPPADES aims at helping the rural and remote communities to improve the quality of their life through the use of information and communication technology.

Benefit we have received from the website:

COPPADES has greatly benefited by the website that is hosted by Interconnection.org. This has greatly contributed to the marketing of the organization as it has been very useful to refer to people and organizations considering collaboration with COPPADES in various development activities.

Options we would like to see in our website:

Yes we would like to have options to have an interactive capability, domain name hosting, email listserving facilities and e-commerce facilities, volunteering and uploading/downloading options so that we can market rural arts, crafts and cultural assets of the people of Nepal. A fully functional website would greatly enhance our ability to work towards the creation of civil society. We would be able to improve the effectiveness of our consortium members as well through the use of website.