EDUCATION-NEPAL: Poor Pupils Lose out to Better Off

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Suman Pradhan

KATHMANDU, May 12 2000 (IPS) - Nearly a quarter million high school students in Nepal are anxiously waiting for school leaving examination results, but most know they will not make the grade.

On average, less than four out of every ten students manage to pass the examination. The best result was in 1990 when half the students were successful. Less than 35 percent cleared the grade last year.

Most of the 240,000 pupils who sat down last month for the tough School Leaving Certificate (SLC) test in the low literacy and low income Himalayan nation are enrolled in government-run schools.

Only those who go to the costlier and limited number of private schools, are seen as having a good chance. In the past decade, the top ten performers in the examination have come from these schools.

Despite being one of South Asia’s biggest spenders on basic schooling, the country of some 23 million people has a growing population of young, literate people who do not have the basic qualification for finding much sought city jobs.

Nepal earmarks more than a tenth — 13.5 percent — of the annual government budget for education, the single largest for any sector.

But the returns are not in keeping with the investment, resulting in a growing education gap between children from poor and relatively better off families.

According to Ministry of Education statistics, almost 30 percent of all school-going age children are out of school.

“This is a worrying trend. The trend started only a few years ago and it isn’t all that late yet if more efforts are made to bridge the divide,” warns senior education expert Birendra Prakash Shrestha.

This should also worry the government as it prepares Nepal’s progress report card for the upcoming global review of national efforts to reduce such disparities.

The exercise, to be held in June is being organised by the United Nations General Assembly to take stock of how far nations have moved towards promises made at the landmark World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in March 1995.

The main goal set by the Summit was to lift living standards of the poor by a variety of measures that include basic education as one of the best defences against poverty.

“An important source of new inequalities (in Nepal) is the unequal access to education,” says the Poverty Report 2000 prepared by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) ahead of the review.

The five-year assessment notes that the Nepal government is “trying to meet the spending targets of the 20/20 Initiative for basic social services and is raising real social expenditures per person, but overall social spending remains low.”

The Initiative, launched at the Social Summit, requires governments and foreign donors to earmark at least a fifth of funding for social development.

Five years ago, in keeping with the Social Summit commitments, Nepal pledged to make primary schooling compulsory. But so far, this has promise been been carried out in just five of the 75 administrative divisions of the country as a pilot project.

Although government schools do not charge tuition fees, textbooks have to be bought. To help poor parents, government officials say a scheme has been introduced under which the money paid for the books is refunded.

“Parents who buy the textbooks are given a refund in a few months time if they can furnish the receipt,” says Maya Tamang, a primary school teacher at one of the public schools in Kathmandu’s Baneshwar suburb.

Dissatisfaction with the quality of government schooling has led to the mushrooming of private schools in recent years. Kathmandu Valley alone has more than 3,000 private schools from the kindergarten to the high school level. There are only a few hundred public schools.

It is the same in the relatively prosperous Terai region of southeastern Nepal. But public schools are the only basic education institutions in the low income, hilly regions.

With an average annual national per capita incomes of less than 200 dollars, that is much less than this in the countryside,

few parents in Nepal can afford to pay the high tuition fees charged by private schools.

According to Sumitra Rai, who teaches science at a boarding school in Birgunj, a town on the Nepal-India border, while private sector involvement in the education sector is a “positive trend” it is only for those who can afford the “steep fees.”

“Poor children have no hope of gaining the same standards of education here,” she adds

Education was thrown open to the private sector following the establishment of democracy in 1990. The aim was to supplement government efforts, but this seems to have worked in a limited way.

Most school age children live in the poor rural areas where they attend overcrowded schools that are usually hours away by foot from their homes in the hills and valleys.

The quality of education in these schools is far from satisfactory. According to a survey of government schools earlier this year, “compared to the money and effort poured into the education sector over the last ten years, the results have been meagre and unsatisfactory.”

“The resources poured into primary education have been spent outside the classroom rather than inside. These have been used primarily to boost quantity of school buildings rather than upgrading education quality,” says Tirtha Khaniya of the Educational and Development Services Centre.

Nepal is trying to improve the quality of education in government schools with the help of various donor agencies. A Danish Development Agency (DANIDA)-funded multi-million dollar scheme is training teachers to improve the quality of instruction in schools. The project has also provided sizeable funds for new school buildings.