Lack of data is severely hampering development in Nepal

The education sector in Nepal

  

The Central Board of Statistics in Nepal has been renamed as the National Statistics Office. Well and good, but what difference does a change of nomenclature make if it is not followed by a change in actual practices? 

The new website looks much like the old website. It is not attractive or user-friendly. But most importantly, it does not have much relevant data. The primary purpose of an organization such as the NSO is to be a repository of cross cutting data that will be useful in the country's development. The more comprehensive and accurate our data sources, the more informed and reliable our policy interventions will be. In the past, policies interventions were made without much regard to an actual understanding of actual facts on the ground; the result was that either the interventions failed in bringing about the required goals or that the interventions themselves were unnecessary, based as they were on a faulty understanding. This is most obviously seen in the education sector. The education sector has clearly failed Nepal despite (though not always) good intentions of the planners. Most Nepalese do not even have a minimum proficiency in mathematics and science, despite the fact that more of the budget is allocated to education than any other sector. 

Nepal's education policy has failed. We have neither produced people who understand civic virtue nor have we produced competent professionals who could push the country's development. The few world class professionals we produce rose on the basis of their own merit (and yes, connections) with little input from the state. But why has it failed? What did we fail to do? Armchair philosophizing can give us answers, but these will not be the right ones (except by chance). To find out the true reasons, or, in statisticians' parlance,  to maximize the chance of finding out the real reasons, we need accurate data. We need regional datasets to compare performances, we need time series data to understand trends, and we need longitudinal data to track progress (or the lack thereof). 

There are other ways to gather education-related data on a sizeable scale. Mobile phone usage among children can offer several metrics. Too much usage can be a size of addiction; too little may be a sign that children are too poor to take advantage of internet facilities. With the wealth of data available because of mobile phone usage, one need not even conduct costly surveys to obtain reliable estimates. Cross-verifying data obtained from mobile phone usage with demographic data can allow us to make educated guesses about mobile phone usage. Then, we can further refine the process to get more insights. The crucial thing is that we could not do this earlier because we did not have the data. Now, with the data available to us, we must ensure that we use it to the full extent.