Main barriers to education
- Shortage of Schools
- Poverty
- Teacher Absenteeism
As far back as back the 1950s the Nepalese Government, through the National Education Commission, acknowledged shortcomings in the education sector and the importance of primary education for all citizens. Various education reform initiatives have since been initiated to account for the country’s diversity, particularly with regard to gender disparities, disabled children and rural populations. To date, though the gender gap in education is declining, it is noticeable and prevails across ethnic groups, rural and urban areas, national geography and income levels. Moreover, there remain rural locales, economically disadvantaged, where schools simply do not exist; where they do exist, they are rife with teacher absenteeism and dysfunctional management.
In light of the education sector’s continued woe, the government has recognised human resource development, social and gender equity, poverty alleviation and quality enhancement as priority focus areas.
To meet these challenges, EAC has partnered with buildOn and United World Schools (UWS) to increase access to quality primary education in Nepal. The former partner’s project activities include: community and parental engagement through outreach and training; and the construction of 80 new primary schools. In the latter instance, the partner project will also prioritise school construction, as well as global education partnerships, free provision of school and learning materials, training local indigenous speakers to serve as teachers and gender sensitisation.
sources: Bbc, WORLD FACTBOOK
Projects
Enrol OOSC Project: Break the Cycle of Poverty
Through a partnership dating back to 2014, EAC and buildOn have been collaborating in a number of countries all around the world to support access to quality primary education for some of the most marginalised out of school children. At this juncture, the joint Enrol OOSC Project is operational 7 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean aiming to enrol 159,211 children, in addition to the more than 55,000 OOSC previously reached.
Remote Rural Schools Construction
The Remote Rural Schools Construction project aims to inspire, partner with, and train more than 78,000 parents in rural and isolated villages in past (buildOn) and future project locations to be active participants in improving the quality of, and access to, education for 43,056 OOSC and 117,264 children at-risk of dropping out of primary school.
Southeast Asia School Development Project for OOSC
Across remote rural communities in Cambodia, Myanmar and Nepal, access to quality primary education is inhibited for myriad diverse factors. In the Ratanakiri and Stung Treng Provinces of Cambodia, stigmatisation and discrimination against ethnic minority communities have pushed indigenous peoples outside the reach of the public education system. According to UNESCO, Myanmar allocated just 1.6 percent of its GDP to education in 2010, which had been indicative of generations of underinvestment in the country’s education systems. To date, the Myanmar government does not have the capacity or the infrastructure to reach the most remote communities in rural areas. As for Nepal, scant government investment in education and where schools exist, mismanagement, teacher absenteeism, a lack of parental commitment and the high-cost of school fees, coalesce to put education out of bounds for the most disparate members of society.
Supporting 5,000+ At-Risk Children Project
Since 2016, EAC and United World Schools (UWS) have been working together to increase access to quality primary education to some of the most disadvantaged out of school children (OOSC) in Cambodia, Myanmar and Nepal. By confronting poverty, lacking infrastructure and socio-cultural discrimination, EAC and UWS are collaborating again to help prevent 5,198 at-risk children from dropping out of primary education.Partners
buildOn
For more than two decades, buildOn has partnered with local governments and mobilized rural villages in some of the poorest countries on the planet to build more than 618 schools in Haiti, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Senegal. In February 2014, they broke ground on their first school in Burkina Faso.
Korea International Cooperation Agency (co-Financing Partner)
The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) was established as a government-funded agency dedicated to providing grant-aid programmes on the part of the Korean Government in 1991.
