Improve education for Nepali girls and minorities

A major focus of our recent Kavre Literacy Initiative in Nepal has been using children’s books as part of literacy education.

As part of earthquake relief efforts, international charities provided books to government schools all over the country and we have worked intensively with six of those schools to maximize the use and effectiveness of those books. We provided 30 classrooms with book corner materials and offered intensive training to parents, teachers and administrators on the importance of reading aloud and allowing children to use and interact with “real” literature.

However, as any librarian will attest, books don’t last forever, especially if they are well-used and well-loved by the children for whom they are intended. If our work is to be sustainable, it is critical that schools provide funds in their annual budgets for the replacement of worn-out books and the purchase of new titles as they become available.

Yet none of the schools with whom we have been working have allowed for such budget allocations. They are working with donated literacy materials and presumably when these materials are used up—as will inevitably happen—they will not be replaced. The work we have begun will be discontinued.

Together with our local Nepali partner organization, we are taking two steps to address this problem. First, we have led training participants through a workshop designed to give them the tools to order new books, providing them with catalogs from three major Kathmandu-based publishers and working with sample order sheets to practice thinking about the process and costs involved in regenerating their supply of literature.

Additionally, we have offered each school a matching grant of $50 to provide an incentive. School leaders have never needed to budget for children’s literature before and it is not easy to find reserves when current operational costs take up all existing funds.

We believe that children’s literature is a necessity, not a luxury, for these schools and for their students. We will continue to work with head teachers, principals and at the district-level to provide for continued provision of school and classroom libraries.

Recently, we observed the two-year anniversary of the devastating earthquakes that rocked Nepal in April 2015. After helping more than a dozen schools rebuild damaged classrooms, we are turning our attention to teacher training.

We believe that quality classroom instruction is critical to school success. This is also an area where we can make a real difference for schools in rural areas where resources are especially scarce. Our goal is for every school to have a library full of children’s books, with teachers and parents taking time in school and at home to read to their children.

In the past few months, we have refurbished classrooms with appropriate materials: books, book racks, carpets, reading tables and cushions. This was part of a pilot program to encourage teachers read aloud to their students—something that we take for granted in the West but that is simply not customary in Nepal.

Most of the schools we support do not have a library. Not because the earthquake destroyed the books; the schools never had them to begin with. To supply children’s literature in quake-affected schools, we’re working with the Rato Bangala Foundation and the children’s book publisher Rato Bangala Kitab to supply our schools with Nepali-language stories.

Finally, after we completed the first round of our latest teacher training program in March, we’re conducting a basic assessment of the impact of children’s literature. We plan to use the data we collect to refine our literacy training.

Thank you for your ongoing support to make programs like this possible.