Collaborate to survive!

"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

We have been trying for some time to find other UK charities working in the education sector in Nepal who would be interested in some form of collaboration. Synergy, two heads are better than one, and one plus one equals three are all phrases which spring to mind. Over the past 5 years we have had "refusals" or "problems" with charities working to provide meals to schools, or providing water, or health education, or libraries, or school buildings, and several more, none of who wanted to exchange services in terms of "you do this for our schools and we will do that for your schools"! What a complete waste of UK money and effort when all that was needed was a little bit of foresight and maybe some coordination by our national aid agency.

Then a couple of months ago we sent an email to the Nepal Schools Trust, a Scottish Charity building schools and helping with amenities in the Pragatinagar and Devchuli districts offering to provide them with some places on our teacher training courses in Kathmandu, at our expense. Why would we do this? Simple, because the Ministry of Education asked us to do it and we agreed, but only on the conditions that we would offer a limited number of places and that the organisation from these remote areas would be handled by "somebody else". So, today we have complete agreement on Nepal Schools Trust sending 32 teachers from 16 schools onto our 5 days Foundation course, they handle the administration and school follow up. Then, after evaluation, we can look at further collaboration probably based on cost sharing but freely using our expertise, all up front, no strings or hidden agendas.

This is a straight forward and powerful message to other agencies working to develop Nepal's education system: We at Nepal Schools Aid have the best and most extensive teacher training in Nepal. If you want to collaborate in spreading it ...... talk to us!