Yes Minister .... that will do nicely!

Who would have thought that when we began three years ago that today, Nepal's Ministry of Education would want to talk about a deal with us to be a special scheme for them in developing teaching skills. In fact the deal is wider than this in that they want to work with us on developing the "software aspects" of quality education in a number of schools which can be properly evaluated.
So, we drove up to this large white building which is the Ministry where we met with Dr Lava Deo Awasthi, Joint Secretary, Planning Division; Dr Lekha Nath Poudel, Under Secretary; Mukunda Mani Khanal, Section Head, Foreign Aid Division.   It's the closest we've ever felt to being in the presence of the British Raj!
The meeting began with the classic exchange of who does what in our respective organisations, the vision and strategy of NSA and specifically our capability programme. Without writing up the full minutes of the meeting the key points made by the Ministry were as follows:
1. "We want to find a mechanism to institutionalise your valued work, it's a treasure to us"
2. "We should work together on selecting schools to be in your programme so they can be the centre of our attention. We need a rationale which specifies which schools, where, why etc so we can make the case for your approach even stronger"
3. "You could help us to understand the greater needs if you are prepared to work outside the Kathmandu Valley in areas such as Humla, Karnali, Tarai so we include the extremely poor areas in the experiment"

The meeting concluded with four specific action points:
1. The Ministry will create a draft Memorandum of Understanding of how we will work together and in which areas.
2. The Ministry and ECCA will investigate any administrative hurdles we may have to negotiate especially registration with the Nepal Social Council.
3. The Ministry with ECCA input will specify needs for next year's training syllabus
4. The Ministry will investigate the teacher staffing needs of our current five schools to see if we can be relieved of funding extra teachers, thereby releasing funds for more effective use elsewhere.

Now, THIS is the type of post meeting action list I like, one where I have no actions personally!
Off to celebrate.