For most schools in Nepal, the academic year starts in early to mid-April. This means that in the next month we have a lot of ground to cover to prepare for the coming year: collecting information about students, selecting the recipients of scholarships, and preparing any changes to the program monitoring process for the new academic year.

New Forms

NCEF’s student selection emphasizes financial need of the student and the promise for academic success. Our local volunteers fill out application forms to collect information about new students applying to the program as well as renewal applications for students who are already in our program. NCEF uses the information in these forms to determine which applicants will be the recipients of financial assistance for their education.

The financial assistance application form is a few pages in length. Although we have been running the program and filling out these forms for more than a decade now, there are always some ways to further improve them. These improvements include a focus on making them easier to fill out, removing questions that did not provide useful information about the applicants, and capturing any new information that may be helpful. In February, we contacted a group of volunteers and asked them to take a fresh look at the forms for new and renewing applicants for indications on how we can improve them. Apart from many small updates to streamline the forms -- and remove redundancies -- one particular change we are testing this year is asking the local volunteers to give a score between 0 and 100 indicating their level of enthusiasm for the applicant while still taking into account both the financial needs and academic promise of each candidate. Although the update may seem small, we hope this change allows our local volunteers to incorporate dimensions that are not easily captured by the questions on the form. We are excited to try this out. We look forward to reporting on our experience in a future newsletter. Interested readers can look at the forms and many other documents related to the operation of NCEF online at: http://www.nepalchildren.org/about.html

This is just one example of how different groups within our organization are working together to continuously learn from one another’s experiences. This allows us to improve the program and bring the gift of education to the children of Nepal.

Selection Committee Formed

The selection committee collects all the forms that are filled out for the new and renewing students and selects the recipients of financial assistance. The volunteers in the committee are not in touch with the students and do not know the students personally. This distance helps keep the process fair to all the applicants. This year, Rabin Aryal (chair), Maheshwor Kafle, and Subarna Dhital will serve on this committee. We wanted to thank these volunteers for their help in this very critical function.

As the selection process moves forward, we will share more information about the progress and outcomes in future newsletters. You can be a part of this effort by volunteering with NCEF or making a donation to NCEF (http://www.nepalchildren.org/donate) so YOU can send a gift of education to the children of Nepal.