Why won't students stay?
Students in a class at Shree Basic School in Majurwa, Haripur Municipality-5, Sarlahi, Nepal, March 19, 2026. Photo: Uma Bista
Why won't students stay?
- Published
Was the promise of emancipation by education a lie? We look for answers in Nepal, a lower-middle-income country that was one of the most successful at enrolling young people.
- Journalist
- Naushad Ali Husein
- Photographer
- Uma Bista
“To develop the brain, to brighten our future, for job opportunities...” Rabana Khatun, 18, prattles off every reason why young people should go to school.
But for all her words, Rabana has a dismal attendance record. “She goes to school if she feels like it, but she usually doesn’t,” says Principal Sanjar Ansari. Only 50 to 60% of his students attend school regularly, he says. Many drop out entirely.
Ansari’s is a public school in an economically disadvantaged village, but the problem is not limited to this one. According to the most recent data (opens in a new tab) from Nepal’s Ministry of Education, only 40% of Nepali children who entered grade 1 in 2016 continued through to the end of grade 10, implying that close to 60% of students who enrol in school drop out without completing upper secondary.
Having invested for decades in getting children into schools, Nepal – and indeed much of the developing world – is grappling with a more complicated challenge: keeping them there.
So we decided to head to Nepal to play the devil’s advocate. We asked: was it a mistake to prioritise getting these children into schools? Or were there systemic defects that needed to have been fixed first? This is the resulting three-part series of articles.
Part one will look at how the rush to enrol students may have exacerbated the resource crisis in schools, and how that has played out in a system that was already unequal. The second part will look at whether schools lack relevance in the 21st century. Finally, the third part will look at the aspirations of the Nepali people when it comes to education, in the context of last year’s Gen Z revolution.
