education | sdef

Education is very important for the development of children and the society. With good education there are more opportunities in the future. SDEF aims to ensure that every child can attend primary school.

More than half of the Nepalese population is still unable to read and write today. Many children are expected to help with the household and in the mountains young children have to work hard on the land. If they do go to school, they get up every morning around four o'clock to help out on the land first. Then they often walk through the mountains for many hours to go to school. Nepal knows the 'caste system'. Depending on the caste in which you are born, many children hardly go to school and start working at a young age. This underclass has so little money that one cannot do without a single family worker. Only 30 percent of these children attend school.

Children can go to school from the age of six and follow a ten-year training program: five years of primary education, three years of lower secondary education (lower secondary) and two years of senior secondary education (higher secondary). The program is concluded with a School Leaving Certificate (SLC).

Only 44% of the children finalizes there school within 10 years. For many young people, vocational training after 8 years would be very suitable. Failure to pass the SLC means that transfer to a vocational training course is not possible. As a result, there are few practically trained people. That is the reason that many workers from India work in Nepal.

Government schools generally have a bad reputation because of poorly trained teachers. As a result, there is an increase in the number of private schools (non-governmental) in the large cities. The percentage that achieves SLC at these schools is 86%.

The children who go to school via SDEF are educated at non-governmental schools in the big cities and governmental schools in the countryside because there are often no non-governmental schools there.