Enhancing Education in Nepal Leveraging Local Government

Nepal’s 2015 Constitution guaranteed the right to free education up to the secondary level and gave the responsibility to manage and operate secondary education to local governments. Elections for local governments occurred in 2017, with the election of a cadre of around 30,000 comparatively well-educated and diverse politicians. Understanding how Nepal’s new local governments can be organized, and what capacities need to be built, in order for them to effectively and sustainably deliver education relates to several questions in state-building and economic development. Through PPE funding, the research team is engaging in a set of scoping activities to: (i) measure local differences in education delivery, and (ii) capture relevant administrative data. In particular, the team is focusing on the feasibility and potential for impact of a pilot to test whether delegating responsibility for education and teacher hiring to male or female politicians impacts education outcomes. The team hopes that this will lead to one or more pilots for randomized interventions in order to explore how locally elected politicians might improve schooling, particularly for girls and historically disadvantaged groups.