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PRESENTED BY STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

International students in Stockholm study in Nepal

With the school year drawing to an end, Stockholm International School had a lot to celebrate as it marked two years of its Nepal Project, a partnership with a primary school in the Himalayan country.

Published: 3 June 2016 11:24 CEST
International students in Stockholm study in Nepal

“One of the best things about my school is that it teaches you to be a global citizen, and the Nepal Project takes this to a new level.”

These words from a student summed up Stockholm International School’s Nepal Project, the largest service endeavour the school has ever undertaken.

Since launching the partnership with a Nepalese primary school in 2014, the student-led team of ten has raised funds to help the 60 Nepalese students, with an annual springtime trip allowing them to oversee the changes as they are put into practice.

The school’s community is truly global – SIS offers an international education from preschool to grade 12, with students from over 60 countries – and now its students are working to ensure they have a positive impact on a global scale. 

At the Nepal Celebration on Tuesday, the students behind the project spoke enthusiastically about its goals and progress, as well as sharing a video of their unforgettable trip.

As the audience of students, parents, and other interested members of the SIS community arrived at the school auditorium, they were treated to Nepalese food, while two members of the student team applied traditional bindis to the guests’ foreheads.

Project Ambassador and tenth-grader Julia Vestberg, who was dressed in a Nepalese sari, began by explaining the project’s aims. 

Inspired by the United Nations’ 17-point action plan for a world without poverty or social inequality, the team have chosen to focus on five of the goals in particular: no poverty, no hunger, quality education, sustainable cities and communities, and strength and partnership.

These goals are put into practice both throughout the year at fundraising events, and during a week-long trip to Nepal, during which ten students from grades nine to 11, led by Project Ambassadors Krešìmir Krajnovìć, Julia Vestberg and Hallie Marcellus, visited the Shila Devi primary school.

Jill Limacher spoke about her experience of the trip and showed a video of the SIS students at the school. 

The team from SIS arrived in Nepal in March 2016 with 12 bags of donations, providing each Nepalese student with toiletries, a toy and other basic items. Last year a student had personally organized a shoe drive, after discovering that many of the Nepal students walk for over an hour to get to school – some even carrying younger siblings on their backs. This year Julia organized a drive for toiletries.

But as Jill explained, the aim of the project is not merely to provide financial aid, but “to support the Nepalese community by building personal and meaningful connections”. The SIS team connected with the Nepalese students, teaching sports and games as well as basic health and hygiene.

Students Giordan Yates and Sebastian de Paz spoke about the support SIS offers Shila Devi, and how they raise the funds to achieve it. Since the first Nepal trip in 2015, the students have worked hard to raise awareness in the school community about the project, and to collect donations which will make a real difference to life in the Shila Devi school.

While the trip is crucial in allowing the team to build connections, most of the Nepal Group’s work is done here in Sweden throughout the year – and the whole SIS family gets involved.

The Student Chairman of the project, 11th-grader Krešìmir Krajnovìć, who has now been to Nepal twice, said: “The Nepal Project has been such a success because so many different people worked really hard. All the members of the team are crucial.We have built it up to become one of the defining points of our school.”

The aim of the project now is to continue as a long-term sustainable effort, continuing to provide the Nepalese students with daily lunches, shoes and uniforms – a legal requirement in Nepal – as well as making new investments in infrastructure and educational materials.

SIS has provided the school with solar panels, allowing the school to produce its own electricity, and is now looking into options for improving access to clean drinking water. 

This is all made possible by students and parents coming together for fundraising events, which this year included three large events; a Fit For Nepal week, a Global Citizen walk, and a concert by the school band.

Regular Friday meetings allow anyone in the SIS community to contribute ideas and get involved, and the team make sure the whole school community is kept up to date with their work, so that everyone at SIS feels close to the project. Furthermore, there is total transparency about what is done with the money raised, allowing students and parents to see the tangible difference they have made possible.

The involvement of the entire school was something which Krešìmir also emphasized.

“For those of us who worked on the Nepal Project, it was really important that the whole community – students, parents and staff – were aware of what we were doing so that they have an understanding and feel a connection to the project,” he said. “Very few schools have anything like this.”

He added that the project hasa positive impact on students from both schools and is truly symbiotic.

“The students in Nepal get material help but at SIS, we get the benefit of understanding this other culture,” he said.

“Those who go to Nepal get to travel, learn about a different culture and be involved in a service project which reflects UN global citizen goals. The highlight of the project is knowing – and seeing – that all your effort has a real world impact.”

This article was produced by The Local and sponsored by Stockholm International School.

All photos and video: Stockholm International School.

For members

LIVING IN SWEDEN

What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

In most countries owning a second home is a luxury reserved for the wealthy, but in Sweden it's very common to have a summer home or 'fritidshus'. Here's what you need to know.

Published: 8 February 2024 15:25 CET
What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

What is a fritidshus? 

In Sweden, second homes are generally either classified as a fritidshus, literally a “free time house”, or a permanenthus or permanentboende.

A fritidshus is defined as “a house which is not set up for all-year-around living”. Rather confusingly, this does not mean that you can’t live all-year-round in a fritidshus, or, indeed, that you can’t use a permanenthus as your summer house. 

The difference comes down to how the two types of property are treated in Sweden’s building code, with fritidshus allowed, among other things, to have lower ceilings, smaller bathrooms, more basic kitchens, worse accessibility for disabled people, a lower standard of insulation. 

If you decide to live permanently in a fritidshus, you do not need to get approval to do so, but the building committee at your local council can, if they learn of what you are doing, demand that the building be changed to meet the requirements of a permanenthus (although this rarely happens).

There is also a subgroup of fritidshus, kolonilott, which are houses with a small amount of land which should be used for growing food (although lots of people just use them as attractive gardens). This is different from an odlingslott, which is just an allotment, essentially a kolonilott without the house.

These are usually in designated kolonilott areas close to or in cities, and are not intended for year-round living. In most kolonilott areas, water supply and drainage is cut off outside of the growing season, and you’re not allowed to register them as your permanent address, for example.

Relaxing outside a summer house. Photo: Doris Beling/Imagebank Sweden

How much does a second home cost? 

The average price of a fritidshus fell by about 6 percent in 2023, following a 1 percent fall in 2022, and now lies at about 2.2 million kronor.

But a search on the Hemnet website for fritidshus under 1 million kronor shows that many sell for a lot less, particularly outside the most popular areas. 

As a rule of thumb, anything within an hour’s drive of Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö is likely to be more expensive, as is anywhere on the coast (particularly on Gotland), next to a lake, or near one of Sweden’s more popular skiing areas. 

A report from Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, out in mid-2023, found that summer houses were cheapest in Kronoberg country (the southern bit of Småland), followed by Örebro, Värmland, Norrbotten and Västernorrland, and most expensive in Gotland, Stockholm County and Halland. 

What’s the point of having one? 

Despite its vast expanses of unspoiled nature, Sweden is very urbanised, with nearly 90 percent of people living in built-up areas and 63 percent in the biggest few cities. It’s much more common to live in an apartment in a city than in the sort of suburban sprawl of houses with their own gardens so common in countries like the UK and US.

This means that most urban Swedes leave any gardening to their summer houses or allotments.

Given the cold, dark winters, that probably makes sense. 

Fritidshus and other second homes are also at the centre of the long Swedish summer break, when people often take three, or even four, weeks off back-to-back. If you don’t have your own fritidshus, you can spend much of the summer visiting people who do. 

What’s the downside? 

Aside from the cost, it’s a lot of work. Owning a fritidshus means weekends spent at out-of-town building supply shops, and brings a whole new list of chores like cleaning the gutters, mowing, trimming hedges, raking leaves and chopping wood.

If you like foreign travel, and have a lot of other passions and hobbies, you may find owning a summer house squeezes them out. 

A summer house in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: Sara de Basly/Imagebank Sweden

How common is it to have a fritidshus? 

There are about 607,000 fritidshus in Sweden, and according to Statistics Sweden, about one in three children (35 percent) have access to one.

It most common to have access to a fritidshus in the north of Sweden, with more than half of children having access to one in 51 municipalities north of Dalarna, and it is least common in Skåne, where in some municipalities only 10 percent of children have access to a fritidshus. 

Is it best to have a second home in a fritidsområde or on its own? 

Many municipalities in Sweden have set aside areas, often near a lake or by the sea, specifically for the building of fritidshus, selling off plots, or tomter, on which people can either build a holiday cottage themselves or get a builder to do it.

According to Statitsics Sweden, about a quarter of fritidshus are in such an area, with Stockholm County boasting the most fritidsområde, or holiday home areas, followed by Västra Götaland (near Gothenburg) and Skåne (near Malmö and Helsingborg). 

If you are building your own summer house, the advantage of doing so in a fritidsområde is that electricity, water and sewage has normally already been run along the edge of the plot, making these services cheap and easy to connect. 

If you want to get a summer house near the coast or a lake, it is also cheaper if you buy one in a fritidsområde. 

On the downside, they can feel a little like living in a housing estate, you have to be careful not to make too much noise, and can end up getting complaints from the local neighbourhood committee if you don’t maintain your property in the way they expect. 

As many fritidsområde were set up the 1960s and 1970s, with a lot of the houses then built by enthusiastic amateurs, they can also be in desrepair and have structural problems. 

The plots that have yet to be built on, meanwhile, are often the worst, for instance with ground that is damp or prone to flooding. 

Renting out your second home

One of the advantages of your second home being classed as a fritidshus is that – so long as you’re only renting it out short-term — you are not covered by Sweden’s strict rental law or hyreslagen.

This means whatever rent you agree with the tenant is valid, there is no requirement to ask for a “reasonable” rent, and tenants cannot contest the rent with the regional rent tribunal.  

Airbnb makes renting out your fritidshus extremely easy and on the other side makes it a lot cheaper and easier to rent a summer house for three weeks in the summer than to own one all year around.  

If you earn more than 40,000 kronor in a year from renting out your fritidshus, though, you are required to declare it to the Swedish Tax Agency. 

You can then subtract a 40,000 kronor ‘standard deduction’ from your rental revenue and a further 20 percent deduction for rental income, before it gets taxed. See the guide from the Swedish Tax Agency here. 

This means if you receive 60,000 kronor in rent, you subtract first 40,000 kronor, then 20 percent of the 60,000 kronor, which comes to 12,000 kronor.

This leaves you with 8,000 kronor to be taxed as capital income at 30 percent, leaving just 2,400 kronor in tax due. 

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