Student attend morning assembly at Shree Mahabir Janata Secondary School in Haripur Municipality-2, Sarlahi, Nepal, on March 18, 2026.

Educational Systems & Direction

Education in Nepal, Part 1: A tale of two schools

Same municipality, 5km away, but worlds apart. Why are some public schools so much better resourced than others?

We’re 5 minutes off the main highway connecting the capital city Kathmandu with the country’s plains, known locally as the Terai. The air is thick with the smell of mango flowers. The blooms are so plentiful that you can barely see the leaves. Wheat fields are turning golden in the sweltering heat. This is the opposite of the snowcapped Himalayan landscapes that Nepal is known for.

The image of those mountains might lead anyone outside Nepal to assume that the question of access to schools in Nepal is a physical one. It is true that long and arduous journeys to school are a fact of mountain life, but Nepal is made up of three distinct landscapes: the mountains, the hills, and the Terai. Only about 6% of the population lives in the mountain regions. More than half of the country’s population lives in the Terai, which has the lowest enrolment rates at just about every level of schooling, according to the national census of 2021.

Why is enrolment so low in the regions where it’s easiest to get around? To understand more, we focus on the municipality of Haripur in Madhesh, the province with the lowest overall literacy rate in Nepal.

The ‘good’ school

Our first stop is Shree Mahaveer Janata High School. Its two main three-story buildings are separated by a large playing field. They are flanked by several smaller ones: residential facilities for visually impaired students and female students from other districts; an older tree-shaded single-story building with an inviting gazebo (the only remaining part of the original building when the school was founded in 2001); a science building donated by an American citizen. Another new building is under construction.

Vice Principal Madhukar Bhandari greets us warmly. He is fair-skinned and light-eyed, his collar is crisp. He has on a jacket despite the heat. His demeanour is warm, but he is troubled. The logos of various national and international NGOs on its signage indicate that this school has resources that others do not. Yet Bhandari is frustrated by frequent dropouts and dismal attendance.

According to the rules, any student with below 75% attendance must repeat their grade, he says. By that standard, two-thirds of his students should be held back this academic year. A fifth of students had less than half of the school year. 3% of students attended less than 15% of school days.

Bhandari says his school is trying to appeal to the young generation by introducing internet connectivity and incorporating digital technology. Given the lack of resources, schools are encouraged to actively seek out partnerships with NGOs and find their own funding for new facilities for school. Shri Mahaveer Janta has been relatively successful in this. It has a science lab, a computer lab with internet, a new library, and smartboards in six classrooms. Bhandari says the school plans to install smartboards in all of its classrooms.

Things are much worse in more remote areas, he says. “In the south, schools are often empty after lunch break.”

Towards the south…

For Shree Adharbhut school in Majurva, about 5km away, computer labs and smartboards would be an absurdity. It’s a run-down tin-roof structure with an abundance of colour.

The walls are a faded pink. The grade 8 children are celebrating their last day in school by playing holi. They are zipping about, their hands and faces smeared with colour, dodging a pile of discarded furniture rusting on one side of the courtyard. For now, they’ve forgotten the uncertainty of the following year. Will they continue school? This village has no upper secondary public school.

We peak into the classrooms. The furniture is barebones, but usable, the whiteboards are permanently stained from years of writing and wiping. One class is missing a sheet from its roof. Sunlight pours in. “We’re still sorting out the costs to replace that,” says Principal Sanjar Ansari. “For now, if it rains we have to let that class go.”

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Outside of salaries, his school’s annual operating budget is 15,000 NPR (EUR 83.50). There’s no room for an extra corrugated iron sheet.

The vest over Ansari’s worn-out shirt gives him an air of respectability. He is lanky and unshaven. A slight hunch bears witness to the prolonged struggle of nurturing a public school in this economically marginalised, conservative backwater village. “There is a certain negativity people here have against the school.”

The development of schools in Nepal has historically been driven by strong community support. Many schools were established locally by their communities. Most schools are built on land donated by the communities they are in. They usually have extra land or a pond, which yields fish or rents that can be used to buttress the government’s menial operating budgets.

Besides its poverty, Majurva is a Muslim-majority village in a Hindu-majority country. Its only public school, Shree Adharbhut, never had the same support that some other public schools did. It has no extra land besides the small plot on which the school is built. The fact that the school has no income of its own also makes it difficult to get donors from the development sector. “If a donor invests in a school, they would like to see results,” says Ansari. “If they invest here, they will not get anything back.”

Shree Adharbhut was only a primary-level school when Ansari joined as principal. He managed to add grades 6,7 and 8. But he was unable to secure any additional infrastructure. So the three extra classes have been made by partitioning the existing classrooms.

The broken promise of free education

As student enrollment surged at the turn of the millennium, the national government’s fund for school teachers’ salaries could not keep up. In the early 2000s, the government introduced a separate fund for “temporary” teachers as a stop-gap measure. Not only did these teachers not get the benefits that “permanent” teachers were getting, but there still aren’t enough of them to meet the needs of schools.

Which means that most schools need to employ teachers through their own funds (niji srot) to fulfill their needs. On paper, these funds are procured through “donations” or from renting out school properties. But in reality, they usually translate to fees imposed on the students.

Vice Principal Bhandari says that besides teachers, there are other costs that the school must raise funds for. “It is extremely hot. The government gives us NPR 60,000 (EUR 339) in operational costs every year. But every classroom has a fan. Our electricity bill alone is NPR 3,50,000 (EUR 1973).”

He says students of grades 6 to 8 must pay 1,000 NPR (EUR 5.57) per year to the school in “donations”. For 9 and 10 that increases to 1500 (EUR 8.35). In 11 and 12 that increases substantially to 4800 (EUR 27) per month. In addition to this, students must also cover extra tuition fees, exam fees, uniforms, stationary, and other expenses. A very crude estimate of the country’s median yearly salary is NPR 180,000 to 360,000 (EUR 1,020 to 2,040).

The 2015 Constitution of Nepal grants free primary and secondary education as a fundamental right to every citizen. This is reiterated in the School Education Sector Plan (SESP 2023-27). However, it remains an unfulfilled promise all over the country, due to the underfunding of schools.

The cost in quality

Certainly the monetary cost to students is a deterrent to enrollment. But perhaps the bigger casualty is the quality of education. With a shortage of teachers come unfavourable teacher-student ratios. At Shree Mahaveer, despite the local hires and volunteer teachers from the municipality, some classrooms have 70 to 75 students to a teacher.

At another school that we visit, Shree Janata Madhyamik, Kisanpur, Principal Shyam Kumar Mahato tells us that he has the same teachers teaching grades 6 to 10 for each subject. He says the workload is impossible for teachers to manage. “It should not be like this. Lower secondary should have a different teacher, secondary should have a separate teacher. Primary should be separate.”

There is also the question of the training and quality of teachers. Teachers hired through niji srot (using the school’s own funds) are not employed using the same rigorous process as those hired by under the federal government funding, who must be licensed and tested by the Teacher Service Commission. They are also paid a fraction of the salary stipulated for government teachers.

The impact of these compromises on outcomes are easy to see. Early Grade Reading Assessment scores from 2012, when enrollment was at its peak, showed that 36% of native Nepali speakers in grade 3 “could not read a word” of Nepali text. For non-natives, that increased to 52%. Literacy has improved over the years, but gaps remain. In the last academic year, 34% of students reportedly failed their Secondary Education Examination (SEE).

Moreover, this system of charging fees reinforces the inequality of schools. For example, the students at Shree Adharbhut in Majurva are from poorer economic backgrounds. It is much more difficult to charge students fees here. As a result, the school must run on whatever resources are provided by the government.

Community management

The nationalisation of schools under King Mahendra in 1971 was blamed for a lot of the failures of the education system, including poor local management, absenteeism of teachers, and the lack of community ownership of schools. In the early 2000s, the Nepalese government, in partnership with the World Bank, began to hand over the management of public schools back to the local communities. The management and supervision of schools became the responsibility of School Management Committees (SMC) comprising parents, teachers and village education committee members.

In addition to the fixed budgets for schools, they are given grants that are tied to their performance. There is also Per Capita Funding (PCF) based on the number of students enrolled in the school. These grants cover most of the non-salary expenses of the schools. To widen the funding further, schools are encouraged to enter partnerships with private donors and NGOs.

Many critics argue that this system of funding further reinforces inequalities in the system by penalising schools that are facing challenging situations.

Pedagogist and education policy critic, Dr. Amina Singh says, “Schools that do well in their SEE exams, will get better funding. So the schools where the kids are from poorer backgrounds, where absenteeism is very high, are labelled as ‘bad’ schools! I’ve seen principles cry in front of me, saying, what do I do when a kid comes to my classroom on an empty stomach? How am I supposed to teach them competencies when they’re not fed?”

Shree Adharbhut in Majurva, with an enrollment of only 479 (mostly poor) students, is a perfect example of the type of school that falls through the cracks. Besides low funding under the system, community management has also caused governance problems in the school. The SMC’s decisions represent the consensus of the local community. Due to the local politics in Majurva, however, the SMC has been dissolved for a number of years. Any initiative regarding the school requires the consensus of village committees to secure government resources.

Over the past few years, Principal Ansari of the school in Majurva had been able to lobby the municipal government to assign a nearby piece of government land to the school for a new building. He said that he received the support of the mayor of the time, Jamirudin Mansur, who was perhaps sympathetic to Majurva because he is a Muslim. “The entire village, including them, made a decision there, that now it will be relocated from here.” But since Mansur’s tenure ended, the process is stuck.

Nageshwar Ray, communications officer for the Haripur municipality’s education wing, says that the correspondences regarding the Majurva school have stopped at the community level, and the municipality is willing to continue the process, if the community reinitiates it. He also says that Majurva is the exception in Haripur. No other school is quite as poorly resourced.

Where to go from here?

Nepal invested in school enrollment with the aspiration that education would be a force for equalising economic disparity. But can this really be the case when schools themselves are so unequally resourced?

The inequality of the education system is something that many journalists and researchers have spoken about, but they usually highlight the differences between public and private schools or urban and rural schools. These differences are certainly extreme. But Shree Adharbhut and Shree Mahaveer, the two schools in this article, are only 5 km apart, both public schools, and illustrate the disparities that exist within the public school system.

While on the one hand international organisations like the World Bank emphasised the need for universal education, they also pressured the government to take “measures aimed at reducing costs and increasing efficiency” of their education and health programmes in the face of resource constraints. But given the fact of these resource constraints, would it have been more prudent to prioritise equalisation and filling resource gaps rather than rushing to enroll more students?

There are many things that schools can do to be more enticing to students, and we will look at some of these things in the rest of this series. But any of those things need resources. The Nepal government has spent 3.52% of the GDP on average from 1998 to 2023 on education, where the investment recommended by UNESCO is 4%.

Certainly an investment in schools will help improve the teachers and school facilities, making schools more appealing to students. But speaking to students, we have found that alongside allotting more resources, this is also a moment when educators must ask themselves what the youth of Nepal (and indeed around the world) actually need from the education system.

The next story in our series looks into the main reasons why students are increasingly uninterested in school, and one initiative’s answers to this question.