The Radio Guru Project

A wealthy minority of Nepali students attend schools vaguely comparable with their Western counterparts, whilst most attend Government schools ranging from reasonable by Nepali standards through wanting by any other standards to woeful by international and local standards. In the private sector, the teaching medium is English and the ICT facilities are generally good. In the Government sector, the teaching medium is Nepali and ICT and other facilities are often largely absent.

Nearer the bottom of the scale, one orphange we helped with proper buildings only had wicker work walls and mud floors - so school was quite literally a wash out for five months of the year during the rainy season. Most river bed children never attend school - or can conceive of regular hours of study. Whilst we have sent inspirational Nepali teachers to them to encourage a thirst for knowledge, we aim to create special programmes for these most excluded groups designed to empower and inform them.

The Mountain Trust is pioneering a new approach to education in Nepal which aims to close the educational gap between Nepal and elsewhere by overcoming obstacles such as lack of funds to attend school, absent, poorly trained and even semi-literate teachers, ill-equipped schools, long walks through monsoon rains off road to and from school, deep river crossings, poor transport, roads and landslides. For the last five years the Trust has been broadcasting top quality lessons each evening for half an hour on Annapurna FM radio to the Western Region.

This enables river bed children who otherwise break stones into sand for construction to have access to the best teaching for free for the first time. We plan to distribute wind-up FM radios so that they can tune in. Handsets have the advantage that several children can share a broadcast and then discuss it afterwards. We take the best secondary level teachers, record their lessons on the mainstream syllabus subjects and broadcast lessons each evening to 21 of the 75 districts of Nepal.

One of our volunteers, Rosie, (Social Anthropology, Brunel University) spent 5 months in Nepal collecting official pass rate data across the districts receiving our broadcasts.

She supervised the translation of the data into several spreadsheets, helping set the foundations for a robust funding application for a fully-fledged three year trial.

When we asked for advice from Alan Court who is the Director of Programmes at Unicef following his Annual Lecture to the Humanitarian Centre at Cambridge, his view was that a variety of radio educational interventions had been tried sporadically around the world and that whilst in general these appeared to produce positive results, no one had conducted a thoroughly designed, monitored and evaluated trial at a national level before to prove the model works. We aim to be the first.

His advice was to find a funding champion and run a trial in Nepal. If it was proven to succeed, it would alter the trajectory of educational provision in Nepal for future cohorts and be taken up by other countries in the developing world. We have been fortunate to recruit a group of MBA students at the Judge Business School, Cambridge to begin forming the nub of what will be a complex funding application.Click on the image to read a copy.

Our objective of broadcasting top quality mainstream educational content for three years would enable us to enrich the minds of children at primary and secondary levels, through every grade - to achieve a 'multiplier effect'. We also plan to introduce adult education along the lines of Nepali style versions of Tomorrows World, Mastermind, Junior Mastermind, environmental awareness, healthcare, safer motherhood etc. We aim to broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and have the full support of the main political parties in Nepal.

We also have the support of the National Campus in Kathmandu (the premier educational institution in the country) who are keen to help us with curricular developoment. The Academic Director, and others are keen to help the Trust develop educational content covering moral and character education which are currently provided only to the educational elite but which could relatively easily be extended to the entire student population.

Last year, we sent two film student volunteers (the top of the class from Cambridge Regional College and his counterpart from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge) out to Nepal to shoot a documentary called 'A day in the life'.

This, together with a host of other hard evidence, will form a key funding application. Our aim is to avoid polluting Nepali minds with Western thinking and values.

Rather it is to achieve two primary goals. First is to close the gap in educational opportunities between sectors in Nepal and narrow the gaps between the quality of education in Nepal and that in the West (more rapidly than Western education is advancing). Second is to give Nepalis the information to decide for themselves which aspects of global culture heading their way they wish to embrace and which aspects of traditional Nepali culture they want to retain. Simply including programmes on safer motherhood could very cheaply and quickly inform expectant mothers in some rural areas that it is risky to give birth in a cowshed because of the bacteria and vital to seek medical help at the first sign of complications. Nepal has very high infant and maternal mortality rates which could be swiftly improved through this model if it is done well.

Our pilot work has been covered in two issues of Cambridge University;'s Humanitarian Centre. Please see the Publications page for further details.