The fieldwork component for the 2019-2020 Global Policy Projects has now been completed by seven UBC Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) student teams who worked with clients organizations on a policy problem in ten different countries throughout December 2019.
Find below a reflection from students whose project focused on developing policy to empower teachers with digital tools to access students in rural Nepal.
Project Client: Open Learning Exchange Nepal
Team Members: Citlali Cruz, Hannah Geiser, Hafsa Khan, Beatrice Zano
The team travelled to Bagmati for an interview at the Ministry of Education’s Center for Education and Human Resource Development. There, they met with a Ministry official to discuss Nepal’s short and long term education goals, and learned more about the current policies in place aimed at setting public school teachers up for success in the classroom.
“The Nepali people are resilient.” This is a quote that emerged from an interview the team conducted with a local NGO, and it is a sentiment they witnessed throughout the two weeks of fieldwork in Nepal. Going into the fieldwork portion of the project, the team had certain expectations of how receptive people would be to interviews. To their surprise, not only were most of the interviewees open to questions, many were also eager to engage with in turn and any notions they had of hesitant participants and stilted conversations were quickly banished.
The team’s fieldwork revealed small but significant details about Nepal that would have been difficult to find had the team not been physically present in the country. For example, the fact that Nepal operates on a six-day work/school week. Overall, the time spent in Nepal is something the team will always look back on with fondness both for the breadth of information they were able to gather and the memories they were able to create.
Read more articles from Global Policy Project 2019.
Visit Experiential Learning to find out more about the Global Policy Project.
