MoE officials say, the focus on certain villages in 46 districts with lower Net Enrollment Rate (NER) than the national average (93.7 per cent) will ensure that the children who are still deprived of primary education will be enrolled in schools.[break]
According to the National Planning Commission (NPC)"s latest report, on an average 6.3 per cent school-age children are still out of primary schools.
However, in some districts, the percentage of out-of-school children is higher than the national average. Having acknowledged the difficulty in achieving its target of 100 per cent NER at primary level by 2015, the MoE has decided to focus solely on these districts.
´We have already circulated a letter to the District Education Offices (DEOs) of the 46 districts to focus on villages where people do not send their children to schools even years after the launch of SEC,´ said Ganesh Poudel, under secretary at the Department of Education (DoE). ´We can achieve the enrollment target if we get the people of these villages to send their children to schools.´
Extremely marginalized and socially-excluded communities like freed-Kamaiyas, Kamalaris, Musahar and Chepang inhabit the villages identified by the DEOs as having lower-than-average enrollment rates.
The SEC has had no effect on these communities. Early this year, the MoE mulled over discontinuing the SEC, believing that it had run its course in the villages where the children are still deprived of primary education. But a recent meeting held by the MoE decided to continue the SEC with primary focus on the villages that have lower-than-average enrollment rates.
According to Poudel, the DEOs will target the villages that have less than six per cent net enrollment rates for building new Early Childhood Development (ECD) centers, upgrading existing schools and allocating teachers under Per Child Fund (PCF) policy.
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