Kathmandu: The Nepal Foundation for Advanced Studies (NEFAS), to recall, initiated the series on civic education programme several years ago to play its part in strengthening democracy in Nepal. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung of Germany, notably, has been the main supporter of the programme series under its ‘democratization’ initiative in the newly democratizing countries.
In that sense, NEFAS has been the forerunner in organizing civic education programmes in the country and has already held more than a dozen discussions with teachers, politicians, journalists and people of various other walks of life in different parts of the Kingdom, from the east to the west. Today, several other organizations have started to work on civic education in Nepal as well.
A text-book for higher secondary students has already been developed and has been widely used by students to fill the textbook void in their civic education curriculum. The attraction of NEFAS programmes for civic educationists is that their output has always been taken seriously and even published. The textbook mentioned above has in fact undergone several metamorphoses just to include as many suggestions as possible. Every edition has incorporated the discussions of the seminars which has again been taken to the teachers for additional inputs. That process still continues.
It is in this process that NEFAS organised the discussion on October 19, 2003, in the civic education series on 19 October, 2003 titled “Civic Education: Role of Youths in Local Governance” in Kathmandu. This seminar is a milestone in NEFAS’ attempts to facilitate civic education in Nepal as it has begun to merge sectoral concerns with the main topic. Local Governance was chosen for this one. Since democracy is itself multifaceted, future seminars will keep adding to the list.
Local governance experts, teachers, political party workers and academicians were assembled in the capital for the discussion. The discussions started without the usual seminar fanfares with the executive director of NEFAS, Ananda Srestha welcoming the participants and Dev Raj Dahal highlighting the topic to be discussed. Ananda Srestha in his welcome address said that the objective of the workshop was not to impose some imported ideas on the participants, but to gather opinion of people from different walks of life. He hoped that the traditional values would guide the participants towards a meaningful discussion. However, he welcomed other issues of social importance if they had relevance to the topic being discussed. DevRaj Dahal for his part said that the objective of the seminar was to find out ways to include youths in local self-governance. “Why do we need to do this? Since a paradigm shift has taken place regarding running the affairs of the state, from government to governance, every section of people needed to be included in governance. Again, since youths make up a vital part of the population, they too need to be accommodated in governance. Only democratic governance tries to include all the sections of the populace,” he said.
After the brief addresses by the two, the working sessions began to discuss the issues of the day. The seminar was divided into two sessions, the first was chaired by Krishna Bahadur Bhattachan, a sociologist. Ram Kumar Dahal a political scientist, made his presentation on “Role of Youths in Local Self-Governance”.