Poonte wrote: "But we do need children to get to where you want to start from too, haina? In order to find college-level smart students to provide help for, they too have to have come from having received primary, secondary, and high-school education, haina ta?" Primary and secondary schools in Nepal are all about passing exams. These schools reward you for your test-taking ability. By paying for a child's education from Class 1 to Class 10, all you are doing is making sure that the child is passing exams. That's all. If the child passes exams, you smile. If she doesn't, well, you shrug off and move on. SLC, for instance, is all based around your ability to pass exams. BUT: Professional schools (those teaching nursing, medical, dental, law, accounting or whatever else) are a little more likely to reward you for your natural talents or for your skill-gathering skill than for your exam-taking abilities. I mean, why would you go to a medical school in Nepal, if you have no talent for, say, studying physiology? And natural talents/interests become more apparent once people get older. And those who pursue their natural talents/interests are likely to be more economically productive. So, it's fair to assume that -- when you catch students in their 20s -- there's a lot of self-selection that's already there. Talented students who have done well in past exams tend to gravitate to pre-professional areas of their interest. In Nepal, when talents match interests, often the only hurdle is that of money -- and this is where strategic private money can help a lot. As such, when helping such students, you can start off assuming that the admitted students are ALREADY good test-takers . . . else they wouldn't have made it that far. That insight then allows to help you focus on helping your students make the best use of their talents for their chosen field of study by establishing networks, providing access to information and so on and on. Hence, support talented AND economically deserving and ethnically under-represented Nepali students. Since -- on another note -- tomorrow's ruling class in Nepal will come from the cohorts of present-day professional school students, it helps to make sure that gates to elitism (and I mean that in a positive way) remain WIDE open to ALL talented young Nepalis regardless of their jaat and religion and background. oohi ashu