Nepal has one of the worst education records in the world, poor infrastructure, an outmoded curriculum, incompetent and politicised teachers, virtually no classroom resources, hopeless school management, and parent communities who see little or no benefit in sending children to school.

Factually, one third of a million children are “out of school”, {313,289}, and around 20% drop out after the first year! 

So, how about this piece of virtue signalling from the Nepalese Prime Minister and the Education Minister? They have each adopted a child to sponsor them through school! …….. laughable, ….. criminal more like, especially since these are the ministers who spent ££ billions of overseas aid on the discredited School Sector Reform Plan 2009-2016 and are now doing the same on their equally futile School Sector Development Plan. They turn away from genuine international advice and expertise, ignoring the fact and evidence that the problem is systemically complex. If a field of fruit trees is rotten you have to dig them up, throw them away, clean and refertilise the soil, plant fresh stock, then care for them. Merely spraying the old trees doesn’t work. But then these politicians know that, but they want the aid money to continue flowing into the country ……. it’s a lifestyle choice! It’s why we walked away from our own organisation and programme in 2016 because no matter how successful we were these politicians wouldn’t even speak to us which became more and more bizarre over a 10 year period.

Our record at Nepal Schools Aid in improving Nepal’s education system is unquestionable:

1. Developed 200 schools

2. Trained 2000 teachers

3. Educated multiple communities of parents

4. Researched and identified the main systemic components of Quality Education needing change

5. Created an Education Leadership programme for school principals and management committees

6. Developed tools to measure and monitor education quality, teacher competence, child centred learning.

7. Created a method of developing groups of schools holistically and systemically which could be scaled up for a whole system.

We did all of this with only 7 staff and £25,000 per annum!

Our parting gift was to spend our remaining finances on a complete rebuild of probably the poorest school we worked with, Motibinayak. A committed principal, a focused school management committee, teachers struggling to put our teaching methods into practice, parents in real poverty, 130 children desperate for education. We’ve written about the building project previously, but we also created a trust fund for them so that capital and income would provide them with 12+ years of money to provide every child with a yearly supply of exercise books, an annual kids party day, a parent of the year award. Last week was the start of a new academic year and each child received their first terms batch of exercise books, “Copies” as they are called, 4500 books overall at a cost of around £650. Here’s a few pictures of the event.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Categories: Nepal

Tags: education, Kathmandu, Motibinayak, Nepal, Nepal Education, nepal schools, nepal schools aid, overseas aid, primary education, SSDP, SSRP, virtue signalling