NEPAL

Location in the Globe : Asia between India in south east west and China in North. 
Area : 147,181 sq.km.
Capital City : Kathmandu Population some 1 Million known as city of temples.
Population : 30 Million

Language : Nepali is the national Language along with more than 123 Ethnic Languages and Dialects. 

Currency : Nepali Rupees.

Nepal, a least developed country (LDC) in South Asia, is characterized by slow economic growth, socioeconomic underdevelopment and a low level of human development. This underdevelopment stems from a politically and socially fragile post-conflict situation, structurally generated poverty and inequality, deeply entrenched forms of social exclusion, and weak governance structures in all spheres of the state. The country’s development efforts faced a serious jolt when the large earthquakes and aftershocks of April and May 2015 affected almost a third of the country's population, killed nearly 9,000 peo-ple, injured nearly 25,000, and resulted in a loss of more than Nepalese rupees (NPR) 700 billion of damage to human settlements, infrastructure, and archaeological sites. The government has come up with a massive rehabilitation and recon-struction strategy to address the direct needs and to restore the economy into a better shape.

Poverty has a strong social dimension as Nepal has a legacy of a hierarchical social structure based on caste and ethnicity. Food self-sufficiency is much lower among socially excluded people. Similarly, such people lag far behind in education and health. Income inequality is high as the Gini-coefficient, a measure of income inequality, stood at 0.328 in 2010. Although many factors including poverty, income inequalities, and social exclusion have under-mined human development, Nepal is still a country with low human development sta-tus. The Human Development Index (HDI) score for Nepal was 0.458 in 2011 (UNDP, 2014) as the second lowest ranking South Asian Association of Regional Co-operation (SAARC) country above Afghanistan. All Nepal’s national human devel-opment reports since 1998 have shown that, de-spite several social inclusion and empowerment measures, there are still serious inequalities in human development by social group, gender and geographic location. 

Nepal is one of the 48 least developed countries of which 13 are in Asia. The country was, for the first time, included in the LDC category as one of the 25 LDC countries in 1971, which expanded to 48 countries in 2014. Since the beginning, Nepal has been advocating for the causes of LDCs and has been actively engaged in global policy dia-logues. This engagement was more pronounced when Nepal was chair of the LDC group in 2010. The country has geared its development efforts towards graduating from LDC status. 

Nepal, despite being engulfed in a decade-long armed conflict during the initial years of Millennium Development Goals (MDG) imple-mentation, has achieved significant progress on most MDG targets. Some targets have been met in advance and others have been met within the 2015 deadline. The country has made substantial progress on reducing poverty and hunger. Using the national definition of the poverty line, Nepal has already met the target of halving absolute poverty and is on track to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. On education, the net enrolment rate (NER) in primary education reached 96.2 percent in 2015, and 86.8 percent of students who start in grade one now reach grade five. The gender gap in school enrolment has narrowed over the years. And the adult female literacy rate had tripled by 2011 from 1990. But the ratios of women to men in tertiary education need to be further reduced.

Education :

The Government of Nepal has developed the School Sector Development Plan (SSDP) for the July 2016 to July 2023 period to continue its efforts to ensure equitable access to quality education for all. A programme has been developed for the first five years (2016-2021) of this seven-year plan. The SSDPs vision to "Contribute to the development of self-sustainable, competitive, innovative and value-oriented citizens for the socioeconomic transformation of the nation, and its mission to produce the needed human resources to elevate Nepal''s status from a Least Developed Country by 2022 and to reach the status of a middle-income country by 2030.