Nepal’s four-pronged poverty reduction strategy is targeted to poor

-Dr. Shankar P. Sharma, Vice –chairman, NPC, Nepal

The proportion of people living less than $1 a day in South Asia has dropped from 45% to 36.6% in the last decade. The region, however, has still the largest share of the world’s poor and income inequality is high. Furthermore, highest number of world’s illiterate live in South Asia and women’s average years of schooling is only about half of the men in the region.

Despite significant progress in fighting poverty in the past decade, South Asia may not be able to meet the 2015 goals of poverty reduction set and agreed by the UN Millennium Summit with the present speed. Only improvement in the impact of national development strategies, enhanced regional cooperation and changes in rich countries’ policies for trade, aid and debt can reduce poverty significantly. Poverty is the war we all must fight collectively.

In Nepal, we are in the process of implementation of our Tenth Plan, which is our Poverty Reduction Paper, PRSP, as well. In addition to the high sustainable and broad-based growth and increased social sector investment, our four-pronged poverty reduction strategy includes improved governance and programs directly targeted to the poor. Devolution of service delivery functions to local bodies and communities and social inclusion are among the important aspects of our poverty reduction strategy. Apart from the reform measures implemented to improve macro-economic and social indicators, HMG/N has established Poverty Alleviation Fund in order to strengthen and better coordinate poverty-targeted programs. Moreover, we are in the process of publishing our poverty-monitoring framework along with the indicators with their sources of information, responsible reporting agency and frequency of data collection, which we think will be a useful means to implement the PRSP effectively and achieve target and objectives of reducing poverty in the country.

We all know that the Eleventh SAARC Summit held in Kathmandu which attached highest priority to poverty alleviation, the leaders decided to reconstitute the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation, ISACPA, to review the progress made in cooperation on poverty alleviation and suggest appropriate and effective measures for implementation and monitoring. Further, preparation of the Regional Poverty Profile, RPP, has also been taken by the leaders in the Summit as a measure to measure and compare poverty status, share best practices and more importantly monitor them.

The RPP is first among the series of its kind produced by our regional organization aiming to serve as an advocacy and monitoring tool to present poverty scenarios and to stir policy makers into action. The report has provided a picture of poverty situation in each member country and compared across countries, incorporated the best practices and attempted to present empowerment status in each country.

However, the importance of such Regional Poverty Profile increases if it provides usable and useful information to the member countries that contribute to their policy formulation and implementation process. For this, identification of a short list of indicators is crucial taking into account the availability of up to date data, their comparability and usefulness to the member countries. Moreover, linking the indicators of the RPP with the common international commitments like MDGs and regular monitoring and reporting seem to contribute to the realization of those goals.

We have to be clear, however, at this stage that the RPP 2004 should not be merely an academic exercise of tabulating data and analyzing the trends, rather it should focus on a particular theme, and with proper analysis it should be able to advocate and stir governments to allocate significant resources for the benefits of the poor and translate the pro-poor programs into action. Let me also mention that the RPP should not duplicate and or overlap the similar publications in and about the region by other forums and agencies. Moreover, it will also be relevant to discuss the periodicity of the RPP so as the member countries can provide the reliable data related with poverty outcomes backed by different in-country household surveys for the report.

EDUCATION AND TEACHING

Narayan Bahadur Basnet, MPA, MBBS, Ph.D.

Changing one’s knowledge, attitude, skills and behavior in an appropriate and positive manner may be termed as education. It is a continuous process. The best example of education often referred to by teachers, parents and guardians is, clay that is later transformed into potteries of various shapes and sizes. Students are just like the clay and every human is a student in some way or the other. There are several basic principles of teaching-learning processes, such as adaptation, copying, imitation, motivation, and conditioning and each of them has important role in education.

The process of civilization began since the very origin of man. Animals also learn however the time span that man spends in acquiring a certain behavior is very short and systematic than in animals. Man has controlled his natural and man-made surroundings and culture because of his high level of systematic teaching. Although man learns from experiences in spite of institutions such as schools however systematic teaching is enlightening both to students and teacher and is extremely important when we consider the limited life span of humans. Here lies the importance of formal educational institution such as schools and universities. Even today, many countries are facing educational policy problems basically due to lack of systematic thinking and practice of teaching.

Human has a special instinct to teach as well as to learn. One probably starts the teaching-learning process in the womb. A mother teaches her infants from the very beginning. Some studies showed the association of effect of various teaching stimulants such as verbal stimulation to her fetus. Teaching before and during adolescence has a fundamental effect both in his/her future life and/or achievements. A vast source of our knowledge and understanding is derived basically in a diverse nature either desirable or undesirable way. The undesirable teaching-learning process may arise from the weaknesses of human being itself, which are flexible biological organisms. These human weaknesses can only be solved by continuous, repetitive, creative education to all particularly children, who have not yet developed opinions, vision about themselves, surroundings and the universe.

Imagination, exposure, emersion, practice, patience, listening, visualization, expression, suppression are some of the fundamental processes involved in teaching, and these are very important factors in educational process. Schools and their activities should be guided based on the basis of these fundamental processes. Teaching policy should ultimately be able to develop a creative, knowledgeable, skillful, patience, progressive and civilized manpower in the society. Primary and Junior High School students have tremendous amount of capacity and learning can be instilled and stimulated with the application of international measures. One of such factors is to expose them to a teacher having a diverse perspective. Local, national and international institutions should improve their teaching policies taking into consideration these central issues in mind.

Education is fundamental in improving, maintaining, and uplifting human civilization. A positive and creative teaching-learning policy can make a better student, educator and above all a better teacher!

SAARC Secretariat to prepare Regional Poverty Profile 2004

H.E. Mr. Q.A.M.A. Rahim, SAARC Secretary General, Kathmandu

You are all aware of the grim statistics of poverty afflicting South Asia. Therefore, I will not depress you by repeating them. What I will do is to keep you abreast of some of the developments in our fight against many-headed monster called poverty and some of the future strategies to tackle the monster.

The Eleventh Summit decided on a number of steps to bolster our work for the alleviation of poverty. First, it reconstituted the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation, ISACPA, for reviewing the progress made in cooperation on poverty alleviation since the first commission submitted its report a decade ago and for suggesting appropriate and effective measures for poverty alleviation in future. Since March last year when ISACPA was reconstituted, it worked hard. The Commission held five meetings and visited field level programs on poverty alleviation. I am now happy to announce the report of ISACPA is ready and will be submitted for consideration at the forthcoming Summit in Islamabad. The Core-Group Co-ordinator of the Commission is Dr. Hossain Zillur Rahman.

Second, the Eleventh Summit directed the Council of Ministers to review, on a continuous basis, the Regional Poverty Profile to be prepared by me with the assistance of related UN agencies, nodal agencies and independent research institutions specialized in the field. In order to initiate preparation of such a profile we, in collaboration with the UNDP, organized a Workshop in Kathmandu last year. When we started the process, we were not sure of the time and resource requirements and expertise involved. To guide our work throughout last year we also constituted a Steering Committee here in Kathmandu. We kept the Member States informed at each stage of our work through the respective ministries of Foreign Affairs. I must say that I received unstinted support from everybody. We could submit our work to the Council of Ministers early this year. The Summit also emphasized the need to promote sharing of the best practices and experiences among the member states and to this end, instructed me to disseminate such information on a regular basis. We, therefore, included some best practices from the member countries in the Regional Poverty Profile.

Third, in pursuant to the decision of the Eleventh Summit, the Third Ministerial Meeting on Poverty Alleviation was held in Islamabad on 8-9 April, 2002. With the holding of the ministerial meeting, the second round of meetings of SAARC Three Tier Mechanism for Poverty Alleviation marked its completion. The report of the meeting along with a Plan of Action recommended by the Ministers is awaiting approval by the Twelfth Summit.

Fourth, as per the Council’s directives, the Governing Board of the South Asian development Fund, SADF, at its seventh meeting in Kathmandu in September 2002 discussed four projects proposals on regional poverty alleviation and decided to commission a comprehensive feasibility study under the Third Window of the Fund. Presently, SADF Secretariat is finalizing the Terms of Reference for engaging a Consultant for the proposed fesibility study. All these initiatives will bolster our efforts to fight poverty in South Asia.

It has been pointed out to us that the SAARC Regional Poverty Profile 2003 suffers from some inadequacies and imperfections. This may give rise to despair. However, you would agree that this is only natural as it was the first time such an exercise was undertaken in SAARC. In our pursuit to strive for better outcome using past experience and lessons learnt, we have embarked on the preparation of RPP 2004. We hope to include in RPP 2004 more explanations and analyses of the presented data. This will add further value to the Profile.

The author’s speech made at the inaugural session of the Planning workshop for SAARC Regional Poverty File 2004, on 11 December, 2003, in Kathmandu-editor.

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