Publication: Social Audits in Nepal's Community Schools : Measuring Policy Against Practice
Date
2012-01
ISSN
Published
2012-01
Author(s)
Prasad Kafle, Agni
Patel, Darshana
Agarwal, Sanjay
Abstract
Nepal s publicly-funded schools have
been managed by community-level stakeholders since 1950 when
Nepal first adopted a demo¬cratic system of government.
Subsequent changes to legislation and policy have further
devolved school management to the com¬munity level,
including the provision of financial resources to support
decision making by school-level committees. In addition to
these reforms, each community school is now required to
conduct an annual social audit. Community School National
Network (CSNN), a national Nepali NGO with expertise in
social accountability approaches, conducted a pilot of 60
schools in three districts (Kaski, Dolakha, and Nawalparasi)
to assess gaps in the implementation of social audits by
schools as specified in the Guidelines for the Social
Auditing of the Schools issued by the Ministry of Education
(MoE) of the Government of Nepal. In each of the three
districts studied, 70 80 percent of the entire school budget
is community-funded. Approximately 83 percent of community
schools conducted social audits in the academic year
2008 09. Their implementation varied between the three
districts but gaps were usu¬ally due to poor capacity and
lack of information about community-level responsibilities.
CSNN led a capacity-building initiative at the national,
district, and community levels that included a training
program for master trainers and facilitators who, in turn,
strength-ened the capacity of the social audit committees
(SACs) to collect data at the school level. CSNN also
developed two templates to simplify data collection and
monitor social audit implementation. The findings of this
gap analysis and training program were disseminated through
one national-level and three district-level workshops with
the objective of influencing policy. A subsequent assessment
of 20 schools in one of the pilot districts revealed that
one iteration of the training effort has significantly
improved community-level capacity to monitor and improve 22
of the 39 indicators in the Guidelines.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Prasad Kafle, Agni; Patel, Darshana; Agarwal, Sanjay. 2012. Social Audits in Nepal's Community Schools : Measuring Policy Against Practice. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20178 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”