EDUCATION-NEPAL: Schools Still Beyond Reach for Girls

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sonny Inbaraj

KATHMANDU, Apr 18 2005 (IPS) - As the United Nations urged Nepal’s government and Maoist rebels to leave school children out of the insurgency that has claimed over 11,000 lives since 1996, UNICEF said Monday the Himalayan kingdom would have difficulty meeting a global goal of getting an equal number of girls and boys in schools.

”The gender gap in South Asia is still unacceptably wide, with 80 per cent of boys in school compared with only 75 per cent of girls,” said UNICEF’s latest ‘Progress for Children’ report, focusing on gender parity in primary school attendance.

”The countries with the widest gender gaps in the region are Pakistan, where UNICEF projections for 2005 show a gender parity index (GPI) of just 0.83, and Nepal, 0.89,” said the report.

Gender parity index is the ratio of girls’ to boys’ net primary attendance – the number of girls for every 100 boys attending primary school. A GPI of 1.0 represents 100 girls for every 100 boys in school. Between 0-1 indicates a disparity in favour of boys; greater than 1.0 indicates a disparity in favour of girls.

The world has made impressive gains towards getting equal numbers of girls into primary schools as boys. Some 125 out of 180 countries for which data were available to UNICEF are on course to reach gender parity by 2005 – a target set by the U.N. as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Yet according to UNICEF, the global average masks huge pockets of inequity. Three regions identified by the U.N. – Middle East/North Africa, South Asia and West/Central Africa – will not meet the gender parity goal.

Countries are considered on course to meet the 2005 goal if their GPI is between 0.96 and 1.04.

According to Nepal’s Ministry of Education, there are 3.08 million children from the ages of five to nine in the country. Out of this number, 486,000 are not in school – of which 372,800 are girls.

Gender parity is a prerequisite if the world is to achieve universal primary education by 2015, the target date set by the UN for a key Millennium Development Goal.

The other MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger, reduction of child mortality by two-thirds, cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters, promotion of gender equality, and reversal in the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

”The reality is that we are not going to get all nearly half a million children to school in 2005,” Samphe Lhalungpa, chief of UNICEF Nepal country team’s education and child protection section, told IPS in an interview, as the new school year began last Friday.

The harsh fact is that Nepal faces a crisis in what many observers say is a looming civil war. And bearing the brunt of it are innocent school-going children.

”Many children in Nepal are growing up in an environment shaped by guns, bombs, bandhs (strikes), killings, the sight of dead bodies and the fear of war, leading them to be preoccupied with thoughts and fear about violence and other psychosocial consequences,” said a recent report by the New York-based Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

”There is a high level of fear of attending school as a result of violence in and around schools, destruction of schools and school closures. Thousands of community schools have been among the local institutions most violated and threatened by the combatants in this civil war,” added the report.

Nepal’s private schools outside the capital, Kathmandu, obeyed on Friday a Maoist rebel order to shut as bombs, planted as a warning, exploded in three empty schools. All of the bombs exploded in rebel-dominated west Nepal, damaging the buildings but causing no injuries.

The Maoists want the institutions to cut fees, scrap singing the national anthem and remove photographs of King Gyanendra as part of their drive to install their own ”people’s education” system.

Gyanendra dismissed the government and imposed emergency rule on Feb. 1 in what he said was a move to tackle the Maoists who are battling to set up a kingless republic in the desperately poor country.

Last Thursday the U.N. released a statement urging the new school year in 2005, to be ”a year where the children of Nepal can learn, grow and play at school without fear and without disruption.”

Lhalungpa said UNICEF was working with Nepal’s Education Ministry and non- government organisations to get as many children as possible, especially girls, enrolled in the new school year.

”A whole range of partners are working together for the first time on this kind of level of intensity,” he said. ”We know there are these kids out of school, we kind of know the districts where they are in. Now our task is to see how many of them we can get into school this year and we will keep on trying to get them in.”

Lhalungpa said UNICEF is focussing on 10 to 12 districts along the Terai plains with India, where for ”reasons of social norms, cultural practices, enormous numbers of girls are out of schools”.

”There you have to basically be strong in your social mobilisation, you have to put your foot down and say girls must go to schools,” he added. ”Community mapping has to include houses where girls are not in schools and to have a dialogue with the parents as to why they are not in schools, and how we could facilitate that situation.”

In the face of conflict UNICEF Nepal and its working partners are trying to make schools to be accepted as community assets in its ‘Welcome to School Project’.

”Only when it is seen as something belonging to the community will the people protect it in times of conflict,” said Lhalungpa.

”We’re trying to create a win-win situation for everybody; the teacher wins, the school wins, the kids win and the parents win – rather than a zero sum game,” added the UNICEF officer.

Aid workers told IPS, schools in conflict-affected areas have been turned into barracks and used for political meetings and enforced political-indoctrination sessions.

According to Watchlist, child marriages have become increasingly common in Nepal as a result of the armed conflict forcing many girls to leave school.

After Maoists abduct a girl for indoctrination, even if is just for a number of days, she is likely to be rejected for marriage proposals, said the monitoring group.

”As a result, some parents are withdrawing their girls from schools and marrying them at increasingly younger ages to prevent this situation,” added Watchlist.