The Project is designed to provide support to the Government of Nepal’s School Sector Development Program (SSDP), which builds upon the School Sector Reform Program that lasted from 2010-2016.
The Program Development Objective (PDO) is to improve the quality, equitable access, and efficiency of basic and secondary education in Nepal. Specifically, the Bank is funding reforms in the following areas:
This will be based on:
With Nepal’s recent move to federalism, there have been significant changes in the way the education system is structured, with direct responsibility of local governments to provide and govern education. This has resulted in low capacity of local and district education agencies to oversee and provide education services, directly impacting the quality of education and access, particularly for marginalized children and youth. One of the Bank’s disbursement-linked indicators for this project is to “strengthen governance, fiduciary management, data systems and institutional capacity for results based program implementation,” yet project design does not address this. Newly elected local officials trying to navigate a new system that has given them more power to impact the education system is the backdrop for SSDP. It is imperative that SSDP take this context into consideration and build the capacity of local and district education agencies.
While there have been programs and interventions targeted at bringing and keeping children and youth in school, they do not seem to be working and some have stopped. Children who are poor face the biggest barriers to education. Mid-day meals used to be provided to children to get them to stay in school but that has ended in most schools and so a lot of children have dropped out. Scholarships are not provided in a way to address those who need them most and are not enough to provide for uniforms, notebooks, and other indirect costs. Around 30% of children with disabilities are not attending school due to a variety of reasons including lack of accessible infrastructure, stigma and discrimination, and lack of trained teachers to teach children with disabilities. Indigenous children are still not all taught in their mother tongue language which has significantly limited their ability to learn and communicate in school. Finally, there remains a gender bias and therefore a skewed gender balance in public schools. Parents prioritize sending their boys to private school because they think they will get a better education, and girls are sent to public school because it is free, but the project has done nothing to address this inequity. With the stated goal of improving equitable access to education, SSDP must address the barriers to education for each marginalized group.
With the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020, school closures and lockdowns have impacted project implementation and exacerbated the challenges surrounding the quality of education for marginalized children. The Bank must work with the Government of Nepal to address the learning loss that resulted from school closures, the ineffective distance learning techniques currently in use, and the heightened drop out rate. Creative solutions need to be implemented to include children with disabilities or other marginalized children who are not able to physically travel to school. The traveling teacher model is a potential way forward to reach students in lower grades as there are limited materials teachers need to travel with; however, other solutions need to be considered to teach upper grade levels because more materials and technology are needed in their instruction. It is essential that the Bank provides technical advice and support to the Government of Nepal, so they are able to address this loss of learning, improve access to education, and enact policies to increase student retention.
The World Bank is financing $185 million of the total Project cost of $6,461 million
BIC has worked with the National Indigenous Disabled Women Association Nepal (NIDWAN) and with Bal Kshetra Nepal (BKN) to identify how children, youth, students, parents, and teachers are impacted by the project.
