Learn how are our students in Nepal doing! Do they need any additional
help?  What did they enjoy last month?  We are looking for a volunteer to
help on the Student Reports Team.  This volunteer would receive all Nepal volunteer reports on student visits, review them for information (provide student highlights to our Publicity team to include in the NCEF newsletter, etc.), translate from Nepali to English as necessary, store records in our database and track reporting performance so we can ensure that all students receive the proper attention.  Non-Nepali speakers are welcome too!  On average, this rewarding contribution will take a couple of hours a week. This is a long-term project - we are looking for volunteers who can help for at least one year.  Please join us in our project.  Please email [email protected] if you are interested in helping out.

- Steven Lustig

One of the important volunteer tasks in NCEF is to visit students.  Dedicated NCEF volunteers in Nepal donate their free time to visit NCEF-sponsored students in their homes and schools.  The volunteers talk to the students, their teachers and their parents or guardians.  They find out how the students are doing in school and if they need any help to improve, such as new school books or increased parental encouragement for their studies.  The volunteers also learn from these visits and suggest ways to improve NCEF.  They submit short reports on the status of each student after every visit.  This is part of NCEF’s commitment to accountability and responsibility.

It was exciting to meet him for the first time. He briefly introduced me to some people who had arrived by then.  Mr. Hari Tripathi (the program director of CE and the organizer of the event) showed me the way into the conference room. The room was dark and I could see only some faint flashlights of UPS batteries being charged. That did not surprise me: we were reeling under 12 hours of load shedding in Kathmandu back then. I was told that the meeting would start after a quick morning breakfast and that power would resume when we returned.

As we look back on 2009, we can see varying levels of visits to sponsored students by NCEF volunteers in Nepal.  Looking forward, we see opportunities for further improvement and challenges in implementing that. A special thanks go to all of the NCEF volunteers who spent their time visiting students in 2009.   We also thank those volunteers outside these areas who helped translate these reports and enter them into our database.

Volunteers visited 49 NCEF-sponsored students in 2009, a slight increase in students from 2008.  Over 110 volunteer visits to students took place in 2009, a decrease of over half compared to 2008 (please see Figure 1 for 2009 visit information). All students in Kathmandu, Kavre, Nepalgunj and Patan were visited at least twice.

Figure 1: Student Visits by Area

Student visits and reports are very important in order to provide the best opportunity for sponsored students to succeed, and to provide the best information to NCEF officers, which allows them to make the best use of the generous contributions by donors.  As such, NCEF’s goal is for students to be visited in 100% of the months in which visits are planned.  As Figure 1 shows, NCEF has not yet achieved this goal.  A total of 35% of expected visits were actually conducted throughout the entire year.  NCEF continues to strive to improve performance in the area.  The percentage of expected visits conducted per month varied throughout the year, with performance improving towards the end of the year (please see Figure 2).  This provides a base upon which to improve. 

Figure 2: % Student Visits by Month

NCEF officers also try to understand student visit performance by area and to work with area coordinators to increase student visits.  Volunteers in Kavre conducted over 85% of expected visits. In Kathmandu, Nepalgunj and Patan, that number was about 30%.  In its first year as regular area, students in Dolakha were not visited at all, which is clearly not acceptable to NCEF (please see Figure 3).  None of these levels reached the levels for which the organization was aiming.

Figure 3: % of Student Visits to Plan by Area

NCEF and its volunteers are committed to visiting 100% of students as planned.  It is important that we recognize some of the challenges with this, which may be unfamiliar to members who live outside of Nepal.  Volunteers sometimes have to spend considerable time traveling (walking and/or taking public buses) to meet with students.  As an all-volunteer organization, volunteers are not paid for the time they spend doing this.  Weather, such as flooding, can make such journeys difficult, longer or impossible at times.  School and national holidays may mean that volunteers or students travel to other areas for family reasons, making mutual contact hard to arrange during those periods. Unfortunately, some students disappear entirely, often to go work locally or in India in order to support their families.

NCEF continues to work with its volunteers to improve the level of reporting.  Nepali to English translators allow volunteers not fluent in English to provide reports in Nepali.   The translations allow the information to be understood by officers and members who do not speak Nepali.  Also to help Nepal volunteers with student visits, reporting and other functions, NCEF continues to offer a small training fund where area coordinators and volunteers in a particular area may spend up to 4% of that area’s funds for students’ expenses.  Typical classes taken by volunteers under this program are expected to be English and computer skills.  This will benefit both the volunteer and NCEF. 

In 2009, NCEF reviewed its reporting requirements in light of the challenges of visiting students, the information needs of NCEF, the rate of change in student situation and in comparison to other organizations that perform similar activities.  The NCEF Executive Committee took the action of changing the required reporting frequency from monthly to once every two months. 

While reporting performance was low in 2009, the Executive Committee is optimistic that this will improve in 2010 since there was an increase in reporting towards that end of the year.  In addition, newly added areas for 2010 have shown very high levels of reporting (approaching 100%) during their time as trial New Areas.  Also, in February 2010, a training session for representatives for all areas was conducted in Kathmandu.  NCEF members from Nepal and the US trained the volunteers in how to fill out the report forms completely and accurately.  In addition, the importance of these reports, to both the students and to NCEF, was emphasized.

NCEF looks forward to building on this year’s student visits and improvement actions in order to arrange even more student visits in 2010.