Running a nonprofit is hard, really hard. Nobody gets into this line of work because it's easy or pays well. For people like those on our team, we do this because we feel it's what we have to. The following is the story of how Manavta came to be, and why.

When Nabeel and I were living in Nepal, we saw things that boggled our minds. How can there be so much beauty in a place so rife with poverty and squalor? Diarrhea is something we knew to be mildly unpleasant, something we had only experienced after eating bad seafood or binging on lactose. We certainly did now know it to be something that kills 1.5 MILLION children each year (UNICEF, 2009). Together with pneumonia, the two are responsible for more than 40% of all child deaths around the world (according to the same UNICEF report). We saw women and girls marginalized to the point of forfeiting their educations: let me explain...