Education for Freedom
– 2nd update
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A couple of months have pasted since the last
update on the Education for Freedom project in the district of
Bardiya in Western Nepal. There has been vigorous activity and
despite some stress among the new staff everyone has worked very
energetically and with great engagement.
Coordination, planning and cooperation with the
authorities
Being a work team of several new staff members
(among these half are women), involved committee members and
numerous ordinary members, we have spent considerable time
planning and coordinating in the past two months. We have made an
overall 5-years plan and each section has planned in great details
its own activities.
Moreover, planning meetings have been held with
and support given to BASE’s committees and fieldworkers as well as
to government officials - especially the District Education Office
(DEO) and the 6 Village Development Committees (VDCs) who are
important to the implementation of the school activities.
These planning and coordination meetings are
vital for the work and thereby the coordinated planning of all the
different stakeholders in the project. The purpose is, of course,
to make the project more successful.
Within BASE we have established 5 working
groups, consisting of BASE district and area committee’s members,
based on each person’s expertise and interest in different areas:
The work groups are:
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Awareness raising and
lobby/advocacy
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Education
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Organisational
development
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Coordination/cooperation and planning
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Monitoring and
evaluation
The purpose of these groups is to:
- Ensure that planning and implementation are
carried out jointly by staff and members
- Capacity build committee members
- Ensure the effective participation of the
BASE committee members from all levels.
Coordination meetings with the VDCs will be
held quarterly. In the first meeting the VDC representatives
expressed their joy with such kind of meetings since, as they
said, NGOs never involve them in projects happening in their VDC
(although fundamental for ownership and sustainability).
BASE tries to make the project transparent –
that is to be open and honest about the activities and budgets of
the project. This is extremely important in a country where
corruption and rumours about misuse of NGO money are widely heard.
Accordingly, our 5-years plan including budget is sent to the
local governance authorities such as District Development
Committee (DDC), District Administration Office District Education
Office (DEO), MS-Nepal and the central committee of BASE.
Government employees in Nepal can be
transferred all around the country minimum every other year
(extension is also possible), which sometimes hampers close and
trustful cooperation. Recently the DEO of Bardiya, who was well
informed about BASE’s work and engaged in Education for Freedom,
was transferred. However, we are lucky that the new DEO seems
equally enthusiastic about the project. He is well familiar with
BASE’s education work as his earlier posting was in Dang district
(where BASE’s central office is located) The Bardiya Education
Advisory Board (BEAB), which aims to strengthen trust and
cooperation between BASE and DEO and to ensure joint advising of
the project, has held its first meeting
Information and awareness raising
BASE Bardiya organised a large
Information–strategy workshop for all 6 BASE districts in order to
clarify and simplify information- and communication systems as
well as to re-start the production of the traditional Sanghari
magazine. The latter is a vital source of information for BASE’s
members and the ex-kamaiyas, wherefore they have been asked to
contribute their wishes for the content of a new Sanghari so that
it helps them keeping updated on the Education for Freedom
project.
Furthermore, BASE has started cooperating with
the local weekly newspaper, Bardiya Times (in Nepali) and we will
get some space on the front page for general awareness raising on
child and educational rights/issues and for more specific
information about the project and for those people the project
aims to support.
The work with schools
The educational thematic working group together
with the Information & Documentation and Education sections has
had a huge task of selecting the schools in the project VDCs. 33
schools are now to be directly supported. These were selected on
the basis of information from DEO, DDC and our own baseline study
as well as an extensive mapping of ex-kamaiya and landless
settlements in each project VDC. The main criteria for selection
were to ensure proximity of schools to ex-kamaiya camps and areas
with many landless and dalits. It was also of considerable
importance that schools had a relatively high population of dalits
and other marginalized among their students.
We designed an in-depth survey (with
quantitative as well as qualitative questions) and visited all
schools, partly in order to select some school for project
activities and for model education centres and partly to help all
the schools getting a more systematic overview of their strengths
and weaknesses – a school profile. Resource persons from DEO
supported in finalising the profiles.
After this time and work consuming exercise 15
schools have been selected for formal as well as informal
educational activities and 3 are selected exclusively for informal
support (NFE). The rest of the schools will be involved in the
general activities for primary schools. The selection was done
together with the educational authorities of the district.
BASE has supported teachers and parents in two
pilot schools in developing a home link diary in order to improve
communication and understanding between school and home. Contrary
to a Danish home link diary this diary is to be used very
regularly on issues of learning as well as social and other
relevant issues – everything in order to ensure mutual
responsibility of parents and teachers towards each other and the
children’s education. The home link diary is being printed.
BASE has carried out pilot orientations on
government policy for 4 parent-teacher associations (PTA) and
School management committees (SMCs) – the rest will follow based
on the experiences of the first four orientations. It turns out
that many schools neither have a copy, nor knowledge, of the new
governmental education policy ‘Education for All’. As this policy
is the foundation for the Education for Freedom project, it is
absolutely vital to orient and inform all stakeholders, such as
school staff, PTA, SMC and parents. The schools must be encouraged
to demand what is rightfully theirs according to the official
policy and as a minimum have a copy of the policy they are
supposed to follow.
BASE is also initiating actions to support
children with special needs, especially disabled children from the
target groups in cooperation with DEO. Likewise we have arranged a
meeting with ex-kamaiya representatives to find out the magnitude
of malfunctioning or specifically problematic families as well as
how best to support them and their children with education.
The work with ex-kamaiyas
The ex-kamaiyas are getting organised and have
had their first general assemblies, district-wise and centrally,
supported by MS’s local support fund in partnership with BASE.
Sundar Tharu (a former kamaiya) from the Laungawhar camp in
Bardiya is elected as president of the kamaiya organisation called
‘Kamasu’. Currently BASE and the ex-kamaiya organisation are
starting a small partnership for capacity building where the
latter gets support for its own activities. This implies that the
Kamasu actually actively carry out its own projects instead of
being receiver as the ex-kamaiyas have been up till now.
BASE Bardiya’s organisational development
section has given training to different members of the ex-kamaiya
organisation – especially leadership training. Although the money
for this is from a different partnership than the one supporting
Education for Freedom, the project will benefit as more and more
ex-kamaiyas will be able and empowered to participate in schools
management committees etc.
Overall the situation for the ex-kamaiyas has
been tough this year as the monsoon has destroyed camps and
resulted in lots of illness. There is no noteworthy progress in
getting identity cards or land for the ex-kamaiyas and
lobby/advocacy thus continues to be an important part of BASE’s
support for the ex-kamaiyas.
Cooperation with OD
Communication and information flows between MS,
BASE and OD have been clarified. These updates will be produced
bimonthly in Danish and English (BASE will make own translations
in Nepali also). Security updates and specific stories will also
be produced.
Nepal and the project
The current situation in Nepal is really bad
and new killings occur daily on both sides (state military and
Maoist). The insurgency in Bardiya district is comparatively less
intensified and so far the activities of the Education for Freedom
project have not been affected. The work continues on full speed
(only interrupted by the annual Dashein and Tihar festivals) and
we are still going in the field although we have to be more
careful. None of the schools have been affected yet.
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