Facility for Studies and Support to the Elaboration of the New Education Sector Plan

Project Description

Nepal’s current education sector plan, the School Sector Development Plan (SSDP, 2016–2021), is set to end in July 2021. The SSDP was developed to support the country to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of providing Nepal’s citizens with the skills and capabilities to achieve these goals and ‘ensuring equitable and inclusive quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all’. With the SSDP setting to complete in July 2021, a new education sector plan is required to guide the strengthening of the education sector within the context of the new federal system of governance.
The production of ESP 2030 will as such be set in the context of the transition to a federal structure of governance. The ESP 2030 will be designed based on the following imperatives:
• Institutional capacity to be strengthened at all three levels of government as per the new legislative framework to strengthen their abilities to guide, plan, budget, coordinate, monitor, evaluate, report and carry out other technical and professional functions to implement ESP 2030.
• The needs and priorities identified at the local level and for national targets and benchmarks to be contextualized and their weight distributed based on local government baselines, context, capacity and resources.
• The international targets and goals that Nepal has committed to, especially SDG 4 and the government’s long-term vision and plans.
• A Sector Wide Approach (SWAp) with active engagement of a broad spectrum of development partners in sector dialogue and a pooled-budget support modality among seven of them with the government, guided by a Joint Financial Arrangement (JFA).

Assignment Description

Macro-economic analysis • Public expenditure analysis • Education sector cost-benefit analysis Following activities were carried out during the cost-benefit analysis: • Assess the allocation of resources in the school education sector from an equity perspective. • Estimate the return on quality ECED in terms of efficiency gains in access and completion rates. • Assess the impact of the engagement of non-state/private sector actors in the education sector. • Assess the extent to which the financial and physical resources allocated to schools are related to the number of enrolled students. • Assess the geographical equity of resource allocation across provinces, local governments and schools. • Assess the overarching financial legislation, and education policies and management that guide policy choices on public resource (re)distribution, and education cost sharing between the government and households.