Nepal, life chances of girls are threatened by poverty, lack of access to quality education, restrictive socio-cultural norms around girls’ roles, responsibilities and capacities, and limited employment opportunities for them to transition into from school.
All this makes early marriage, pregnancy, and capped personal development a reality for many. Mercy Corps with its local partner FAYA Nepal, under UKAID’s Girls Education Challenge program, has been working for the last two years to change this situation in Kailali district. The program is implemented through 38 projects in 18 countries globally. As Supporting the Education of Marginalized Girls (STEMS) Girls in Kailali draws to a close in 2016, it has been able to achieve marked differences to the lives of girls and young women in Kailali, both in and out of school. Working at the parental and community level, its extensive and continuous EGAP (Educate Girls, Alleviate Poverty) campaign has managed to effect tangible changes in parents’ perspectives on, as well as their ability to finance, girls’ education. As part of the EGAP campaign, since the start of 2014, program staff have supported the DEO by distributing information on government scholarships and by the mid-point of the program in August 2015, take up of these scholarships in STEM schools had reached an impressive 93 percent compared to non-project schools in Kailali where scholarship take up was 73 percent.
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