Urmila Chaudhary is a Nepalese women’s rights activist and a former domestic slave under the Kamlari system, a form of debt bondage. At the age of six, she was forced to leave her family and was sold into domestic servitude. For 11 years, she was exploited, abused, and forced to work without any compensation in the house of a wealthy, well-known family in Kathmandu. Chaudhary was rescued by the Nepal Youth Foundation at 17 and began her fight for the many girls still enslaved under the Kamlari system. She is the subject of the 2016 award-winning German documentary “Urmila: My Memory is My Power,” which follows her fight for Kamlaris rights and freedom. In 2017, she won the Theodor Haecker Prize for political courage and sincerity.
