Nepal s publicly-funded schools havebeen managed by community-level stakeholders since 1950 whenNepal first adopted a demo¬cratic system of government.Subsequent changes to legislation and policy have furtherdevolved school management to the com¬munity level,including the provision of financial resources to supportdecision making by school-level committees. In addition tothese reforms, each community school is now required toconduct an annual social audit. Community School NationalNetwork (CSNN), a national Nepali NGO with expertise insocial accountability approaches, conducted a pilot of 60schools in three districts (Kaski, Dolakha, and Nawalparasi)to assess gaps in the implementation of social audits byschools as specified in the Guidelines for the SocialAuditing of the Schools issued by the Ministry of Education(MoE) of the Government of Nepal. In each of the threedistricts studied, 70 80 percent of the entire school budgetis community-funded. Approximately 83 percent of communityschools conducted social audits in the academic year2008 09. Their implementation varied between the threedistricts but gaps were usu¬ally due to poor capacity andlack of information about community-level responsibilities.CSNN led a capacity-building initiative at the national,district, and community levels that included a trainingprogram for master trainers and facilitators who, in turn,strength-ened the capacity of the social audit committees(SACs) to collect data at the school level. CSNN alsodeveloped two templates to simplify data collection andmonitor social audit implementation. The findings of thisgap analysis and training program were disseminated throughone national-level and three district-level workshops withthe objective of influencing policy. A subsequent assessmentof 20 schools in one of the pilot districts revealed thatone iteration of the training effort has significantlyimproved community-level capacity to monitor and improve 22of the 39 indicators in the Guidelines.
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