Ranjila is a shy, seventeen-year-old Tamang beauty who has spent her entire life in a village in the hill country of central Nepal. On November 17, 2011, she introduced me to her aama—her mother—outside their mud-walled home. Ranjila’s father is dead; he perished falling from a tree while gathering fruit. When I inquired how Aama, who is illiterate, provided for Ranjila and her six siblings, Ranjila explained that she toiled in other families’ fields for $2.50 per day. Later I learned that to make ends meet, Aama had also been forced to borrow money at usurious interest rates—a debt that grows larger every month, which she has no hope of ever repaying. The margin by which this household survives from week to week and year to year is as thin as a stalk of rice.

Throughout this corner of Nepal, bright-eyed adolescents like Ranjila are routinely targeted by predatory “brokers” who rove through the villages attempting to lure girls from their homes with promises of marriage or lucrative jobs in distant lands. Owing to their hard circumstances and ignorance, the girls’ families often succumb to the brokers’ deceptions and hand over their daughters in return for payment of a dollar or two. Occasionally families are so desperate to offer their children better lives that they actually pay the brokers to take their daughters off their hands. Some girls are delivered to Saudi Arabia or Lebanon or Dubai and given legitimate, if exploitative, employment as household servants. The brokers, however, are just as likely to take the girls to India and sell them to brothels in Mumbai or Kolkata for $500 a head.

In 1992, an eminent Nepalese physician and activist named Aruna Uprety traveled to Mumbai to attend a seminar on HIV/AIDS. While there, she visited a girl named Nisha who had worked in a brothel for the previous seven years, was hospitalized with AIDS, and had recently given birth to a baby girl. Three days after Dr. Uprety’s saw her, Nisha died. During her stay in Mumbai, Uprety also visited local brothels, where she spoke with many women and girls, some as young as fourteen, and discovered that a significant number of them were Nepalese, like Nisha. From these young prostitutes, Uprety says, she learned that

for years at a time, they are physically abused and held in debt bondage, which is tantamount to slavery. They are raped and beaten severely if they don’t surrender easily or if they refuse to have sex with customers.

Brothel owners—who may be either men or women—will even beat them after submission if they don’t bring in enough money. Many of these young and illiterate girls contract AIDS, and once this condition becomes known to their keepers, the girls are thrown out of the brothels to return home to die—that is, if their communities will accept them back.

A report issued in 2009 by the U.S. Department of State notes that more than 22,000 Nepalese women and girls are trafficked annually. Most are no older than eighteen when they are taken from their homes. Many are only twelve or thirteen.

Uprety says her visit to the brothels of Mumbai nineteen years ago was “the turning point in my life, when I thought that something must be done for the girls.” The upshot was a groundbreaking program called Stop Girl Trafficking (SGT) she launched in 1997 in partnership with the American Himalayan Foundation (AHF). Rather than rescuing victims from brothels after they had been trafficked, Uprety created SGT to prevent as many girls as possible from being trafficked in the first place.

Ranjila is one of SGT’s success stories. Four years ago, during a visit to Ranjila’s village, Uprety and her staff determined from conversations with Ranjila’s mother, teachers, and village elders that the challenges faced by Ranjila’s family made her particularly susceptible to being trafficked. To preclude this eventuality, SGT staffers spent a lot of time educating Ranjila and her mother about the dangers of trafficking, and then offered Ranjila a scholarship that covered the cost of her books, school supplies, school uniforms, and fees. She has been enrolled in her local school and excelled at her studies ever since. Indeed, according to her teachers, Ranjila has become a role model for girls in the village. One teacher told me that Ranjila and other “SGT scholars” now regularly warn their classmates to steer clear of traffickers, and that trafficking in the area has definitely declined as a consequence. When I asked Ranjila how long she intends to wait to get married, she assured me with a hearty laugh, “Long time. Not until my education is complete!”

After starting with 54 girls, SGT has now established programs at 400 government schools in districts plagued by some of Nepal’s highest rates of trafficking. Presently 9,000 girls who were at risk of being trafficked are safely attending school thanks to the efforts of Dr. Uprety and SGT. The graduation rate for SGT scholars is 82%, and less than 2% have dropped out of the program. All of this is achieved at a cost of $100 per girl per year.

Uprety’s methods are ridiculously simple on the face of it: Identify the girls most at risk, then do whatever it takes to keep them in school in order to prevent them from being trafficked. But the remarkable success of SGT ultimately depends on a large network of dedicated, well-trained field workers who repeatedly visit the SGT scholars in their villages, some of which are inaccessible by road and can only be reached via a half-day hike. This allows SGT staff to maintain personal relationships with the girls, their parents, and their teachers, and provide ongoing counseling about the perils of trafficking. Uprety and her crew are continually monitoring outcomes and assessing their methods to determine what works and what doesn’t. Unlike other organizations that provide upfront assistance and then move on, SGT and AHF are committed to supporting each girl in the program through graduation and beyond. It ain’t easy and it ain’t cheap over the long haul. But speaking as a major donor to SGT who spent much of the past month on the ground in Nepal, scrutinizing the program’s operations with an investigative journalist’s pitiless gaze, I’m confident that I’ve never been involved with a more worthy or cost-effective project.

This story appears in slightly abbreviated form in the American Himalayan Foundation's 2011 Review."