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NCEF provides financial assistance that enables many poor Nepalese children to attend school. Many children in Nepal—especially those in rural areas—need financial assistance to continue their education. Due to limited resources, NCEF cannot support all the students that apply for financial assistance through our area coordinators. Every year, the task of the selection committee is to identify the neediest students for NCEF to support.
The Team:
The student selection committee for the 2017 - 2018 year consisted of Rabin Aryal (Chair), Maheshwor Kafle and Subarna Dhital.
Procedure:
NCEF currently operates in five areas in Nepal: Gorkha, Nawalparasi, Nepalgunj, Samkhuwasabha and Sunsari. Our volunteers collected applications for new and renewal of financial assistance from students in these areas. In addition, this year NCEF decided to expand its support by taking on an additional three students in Gorkha, 6 students in Nawalparasi, 5 students in Nepalgunj, and 8 students in Sunsari.
The two main procedural components to the student selection process are the selection criteria and the application forms. This year, we did not make any significant changes to either, and used the same criteria and forms as the past two years having used them with great success and ease. Details about the student selection criteria and applications forms are available on NCEF’s website at:
● Selection Criteria
● Application for Financial Assistance
Our application form includes several questions designed to assess the material wealth in a household (e.g. mobile phones, TV, radio, etc.) as well as the livestock owned by a family. This provides us with a better picture of the resources available to an applicant’s family.
We e-mailed the application forms to our field volunteers in Nepal, who then distributed the new applications to schools as well as to parents. Volunteers also distributed the renewal applications to all students that received financial assistance during the previous year.
Field coordinators collected the applications and academic reports from schools. They scanned all these documents and emailed them to the NCEF selection committee. For each renewal applicant they also provided us with their recommendation on whether or not NCEF should continue funding the student. After receiving all the applications from an area, they were distributed to all selection committee members.
Selection Process:
Renewal students: When deciding whether or not to renew a student’s funding, our goal was to verify three things: (1) has the student been promoted to the next class? (2) has the student’s financial condition improved to the point where they do not need NCEF support? (This happens on rare occasions.), and (3) is the environment in a student’s home and his/her health good enough to allow the student to focus on his/her education? If certain renewal applications require special consideration, we interact with the field volunteers for additional information and document any requirements that are waived.
New students: For each area, all committee members rank each applicant based on their application and the recommendations from field volunteers. The rankings from all selection committee members are averaged out to create a final ranking for that area. Top candidates from this list are selected for financial assistance. Ties were resolved through discussion and voting amongst the selection committee members. All the selections should satisfy the NCEF criteria.
Results:
We selected 92 students in total. Some of the renewal applications were for students who had passed the SLC examination. These decisions could not be made until after the SLC examination results were declared, and hence, were made separately from the rest of the students. The following table shows the distribution of students across the various areas.
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Area
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Number of students
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Sunsari
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40
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Gorkha
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6
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Nawalparasi
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12
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Nepalgunj
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23
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Samkhuwasabha
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11
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Total
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92
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Distribution of Students by Gender:
Highlights:
- A majority of the NCEF students supported during the 2016 - 2017 school year did well academically, and their funding has been renewed for another year. In particular, Kalpana Kumal of Gorkha, Kamala Raidash and Prerna Dhunghana of Nepalgunj, Mamta Mehata, Rabin Pariyar Damai, Rabina Sada, Sanjay Uraw and Simran Shrestha from Inaruwa have passed grade 10.
- To overcome the delay in making renewal decisions, often due to late arrival of mark sheets, this year we made provisional decisions that were later confirmed after mark sheets were received. This was done based on a recommendation by last year’s committee. We are happy to report that this experiment worked well—we received mark sheets in all cases, albeit after a waiting period of two to four weeks—and our provisional approvals ensured that students received the funds in a timely manner.
Challenges:
Government and local authority organizations wish to create a role for them in student selection decision but there is no existing formal mechanism for such a role. This is something we could explore in the future.
Acknowledgements:
The selection committee would like to thank all the NCEF volunteers for collecting and sending student applications
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