[:en]Programming for the future of Nepal[:]

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CDN has put an emphasis on combining online and offline solution as an integrated part of our strategy. Even though we know, that internet is not yet such a common place as in Europe, still around 54 % of the population are meanwhile using the internet and the advantages lie at hand.

By collecting all the information about jobs and educations online, they can be accessed from youth workers, teacher and youth from all over the country without having to carry around heavy folders with the same information in printed. While developing we have focussed on keeping the pages simple, so that low band with in rural areas does not hamper users to surf our comprehensive online information.

The advantage of digitalizing the psychometric assessment was even clearer at hand. One of the principles of psychological testing is that the test is conducted under standardized conditions and analysed in a similar manner. Having the test online is guaranteeing that every test is conducted and analysed according to this standard.

For those students, who do not have access to infrastructure to conduct the test online we also have thought about a solution. Our partners can access a protected area on our website in which they have the possibility to upload questionnaires which have been filled in paper. During our first joint project they get trained on how to conduct the assessment, how to upload the answers and how to retrieve the result from the system. Clients also can choose to receive their results via email as a PDF in addition to receiving it printed from their local career helper and also can later on at every time log in to our system and review their results from an internet café or similar.

Last but not least do engaged teachers or youth counsellors have the possibility to purchase our services in bulk for a whole class or group of youth. It is possible through our collaboration with ESEWA to do so from all districts in Nepal. Packages as cheap as Rs. 200 can be purchased directly in cash at one of the 25000 ESEWA-Agents, who can be found all over Nepal.

In short we have used online tools to guarantee high quality and standardized results for our psychological assessment and to be able to reach out to whole Nepal without establishing a costly physical infrastructure in a first step. All this has been possible because of great team work in CDNs technical team and a joint vision of what we want to achieve and where online tools can help us achieving that goal. A special thanks once again goes to Patrick Menke who with a very high degree of accuracy as well as dedication makes our technical dreams come true.

There are still many wishes on our bucket list, which help us to reach out to even more people and support Nepal’s youth even more effectively with our service. Things such as having a mobile version of our assessment, having a full text search all over our database or statistics for schools about their student’s needs can help us to fulfil our mission to provide youth from all over Nepal with quality career counselling tools.

For that sake we are currently looking for software developers, who are ready to support our cause by donating some hours of their valuable working time for us. Please help us finding someone by sharing our campaign on betterplace.org.

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