What we do best
Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) program ensures young children receive the best support during their crucial first few years to become physically and emotionally healthy and intellectually curious. Save the Children (SC) supports ECCD center construction and renovation, trains facilitators and Female Community Health Volunteers, supports management committees and facilitates parenting program.
Our Ready to Learn approach aims to address gaps in learning and increase adults’ capacity to support children’s development. Save the Children works with schools and communities to identify all out-of-school children and help enroll and keep them in school. Working with schools, teachers, and communities, Literacy and Numeracy Boost approach enhances early grade reading, writing, and math skills including home learning environment through reading and math camps and book banks.
Our Quality Learning Framework (QLF) offers a universal standard for the creation and improvement of quality of learning environments. As the Co-Lead of Nepal Education Cluster, Save the Children proactively supports Federal and State governments in cluster coordination, developing National Contingency Plan, COVID-19 Preparedness and Response Plan and materials and guidelines including home-schooling.
To ensure uninterrupted education, Save the Children works with partners to improve the country’s capacity to cope with future disasters and learn from the past, ensuring Safe School and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) remains a priority.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in fall in school enrolment, drop-outs and significant learning loss. Save the Children adopted alternative education strategies and remedial programs for children to mitigate these challenges. Save the Children focuses on improving access to quality learning environment for children with disabilities while GESI framework ensures that education program reach out to children who are discriminated against.
Future directions
Despite the good progress on access to ECCD services and enrolment of children in school, still, 34.8% of children aged 36-59 months are not developmentally on track. Children have low learning achievement at the primary level. On average, the third-grade children were unable to solve 56.5% of the reading and 62.78% of the math-related problems.
The situation is more exaggerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Country Strategy Period 2022-2024, Save the Children will focus on implementing of an integrated ECCD policy and package of interventions. Our program will emphasize the improvement of the learning performance of children in early grades through the mainstreaming of our key common approaches Building Brain, Read to Learn, Numeracy and Literacy Boost, Safe School, and Enabling Teacher. Save the Children will prioritize safe back to school from the impact of the pandemic and other shocks; and test and scale alternative education modalities including remedial education for children struggling to learn.
Save the Children will work closely with federal and state governments and provide technical support on the development and implementation of local-level policy/strategy, shifting teaching methods from teacher-centered to child-centered approach, ensuring quality education, continuing to improve access to quality ECCD and basic education, and mainstreaming safe school into all our work. Furthermore, we will also work with civil society organizations, academic institutions, UN agencies, networks, and parliamentarians to develop inclusive policies/ procedures and provide quality services to reach children most in need.
