Internship at the Ministry of Education and Sports, Lao PDR (Natsumi Shibata)

I conducted my internship under the supervision of Dr. Bounpanh, the director general of the Department of Planning, Ministry of Education and Sports (MOES), Lao PDR from July 17^th to August 11^th, 2023. During my internship, I was assigned to the Education Coordination Unit (ECU) team in the Department of Planning and engaged in two main activities. First, I participated in the workshop on the World Bank’s project for early childhood education which is called Global Partnership for Education III Learning and Equity Acceleration Project in Lao PDR (GPE III LEAP). Second, I visited a kindergarten and conducted an interview survey with children, parents, and teachers.

The first activity included the participation in the workshop on the World Bank’s project, GPE III LEAP, which deepened my understanding of the progress, challenges, plans, and budget allocations of the project by listening to project reports from the various departments of the MOES. Specifically, I learned how the Department of Planning, which plays a central role in project execution, works with other departments in MOES and what room remains for improvement of the project. Through the six-day workshop, I learned the importance of each department having a common understanding of the project’s objectives, as well as the risks that can happen in a mid-and long-term project and how to respond to those risks.

The second activity was to conduct an interview survey focused on kindergarten children’s readiness to enter primary school and the parent’s involvement in early childhood education. During this survey, I visited 8 kindergartens in the Vientiane Capital, one public or private kindergarten per district, and interviewed 16 children, 16 parents, and 8 teachers in total. I also conducted a questionnaire survey to parents to identify the household characteristics before the interview survey. I received valuable advice from the ECU team, the educational policy advisor, and the officers from the Department of Monitoring and Evaluation, and I learned how to coordinate school visits and interview surveys, and an effective way of asking questions to listen to the unique stories of survey participants toward the research questions.

This internship experience enabled me to understand the efforts that were made by MOES and each educational institution to ensure access to quality early childhood education, and what policies should be made in the future to provide quality education for children, especially those who have been left behind. Also, I was able to adapt what I learned through the lectures at Kobe University to the actual field survey and gained unique opinions from children, parents, and teachers in the kindergartens which I could not catch from the previous literature and official documents. I would like to make the most of what I gained from the internship in my master’s thesis.

Last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Bounpanh for kindly accepting me as an intern, Mr. Anoupheng and the ECU teams for providing me with generous support to conduct the survey, Professor Keiichi Ogawa for always giving me invaluable learning opportunity, and to all those who kindly cooperated in the survey.

Authored by Natsumi Shibata (2^nd year master’s student)