NEWS AND FEATURES ON THE SOLIDARITY 2000 CAMPAIGN IN COPENHAGEN

Nepal

Nepal
Rich-Poor Gulf Stays, Despite Big Spending

Struggling At Last for Freedom

Rich-Poor Gulf Stays, Despite Big Spending

By Suman Pradhan

KATHMANDU,, June 2000 (IPS) - She's sixteen and wants to be a doctor. But first, Trisha Sharma will have to clear Nepal's School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examination that has tripped many young careers before they could take off.

However, Trisha, a pupil at a top private school, Kathmandu's Adarsha Vidya Mandir, knows she can do it. ''I am confident of passing out with a good score,'' she says.

Niraj Nagarkoti, who goes to a government-run public school in the Nepali capital Kathmandu, is not so sure and thinks the examination is ''a game of luck.'' ''I have done my best. I cannot say what will happen with the results. If successful, I will go to college, if not, I'll lose one year,'' he says.

The two are among the nearly quarter million students who are anxiously waiting for the SLC result due in July/August. Most will not make the grade. On average, less than four out of every 10 students clear the SLC.

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, in this low literacy and low income Himalayan nation of more than 20 million people, who sat down last month for the SLC, are enrolled in government-run schools.

Only those like Trisha, who go to expensive private schools, are seen as having a good chance. In the past decade, the top 10 performers in the examination have come from these schools. Despite being one of South Asia's biggest spenders on basic schooling, Nepal has failed to bridge the education gulf between children from poor and better off families.

The government earmarks more than a tenth -- 13.5 percent -- of its annual budget for education, the single largest for any sector. Senior education expert Birendra Prakash Shrestha called the education dive ''a worrying trend'' which started a few years ago. But it can still be narrowed ''if more efforts are made to bridge the divide.''

This should also worry the government as it prepares for the upcoming global review of national efforts to reduce education and other social disparities. Five years ago, in keeping with its Social Summit commitments, Nepal pledged to make primary schooling compulsory.

But so far, this promise has been carried out in just five of the 75 administrative divisions of the country as a pilot project. According to Ministry of Education statistics, almost 30 percent of all school-going age children are out of school. Education experts say Nepal has a long way to go.

Says Dr. Chaitanya Mishra of Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University: ''Nepal's reaffirmation of making primary education universal is going to take some time. It cannot be achieved for another 10 years, though the trends in this direction have been encouraging.''

According to the U.N. Development Programme's (UNDP) Poverty Report 2000 which reviews nations' progress toward Social Summit goals, a major source of sharp economic inequalities in Nepal is ''the unequal access to education.''

But it is not enough to have every child in school unless the education is useful. 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. Education was thrown open to the private sector a decade ago to supplement government efforts. According to Sumitra Rai, who teaches science at a boarding school in Birgunj, a town on the Nepal-India border, private sector involvement in education is a ''positive trend'', but it is only for those who can afford the ''steep fees.''

With an average annual national per capita income of less than 200 dollars -- and much less than this in the countryside - few parents in Nepal can afford the high tuition fees charged by private schools. 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. A survey of government schools early this year, noted that ''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 that carried out the survey. Government schooling is free, but textbooks have to be bought.

However, under a new scheme, the cost of the books is refunded if parents can furnish the bill. According to Dr Mishra, three things are needed to bridge the gap between private and public schooling in Nepal. ''One is to find out a way to hand over the management of public primary schools to the community where the community makes the decisions.

At the moment, all education-related decisions are centralised. It is the district education officer who makes the decisions, communities have no roles to play,'' he says. More funds should also be allocated to public primary schools.

And lastly, a way has to be found to motivate teachers themselves to go to school. Many primary teachers in remote public schools, hardly do so, he says. Nepal's education policymakers will also have to think of making schooling useful for the majority of students who come from low-income families.

''I would say that majority of Nepal's public school children are ill-equipped for the job market,'' says Mishra, who thinks that the current vocational training programmes in such schools have been ineffective.

A section of Nepal's employers agree. According to Bal Krishna Shrestha, a business contractor in Kathmandu, most products of the country's public schools are not equipped for the job market. ''They have to be retrained, apprenticed for the jobs that I provide,'' he says.