Literacy & Girls' Education Nonprofit at Work in Nepal

Our first country of operation, Room to Read Nepal, pioneered much of Room to Read’s early work. Today, our literacy and girls’ education programs thrive throughout Nepal and we continue to be a catalyst for change in the country’s educational landscape.

With a gift to Room to Read, you can provide life-changing educational resources to children in Nepal who face numerous barriers in gaining a quality education. Every contribution goes toward the most pressing priorities, including:

Literacy

Train and coach more educators from more early grades

Our comprehensive Literacy Program in Nepal to date has been focused on the youngest primary school learners, with instructional materials and student workbooks designed for Grade 1 and 2 students. In 2025, Room to Read is broadening the scope of this work to include another early grade, with the pilot implementation of Grade 3 instructional design in more than 100 partner schools.

Building off early work in 2024 to test the design of the Grade 3 content and implementation, throughout 2025, we will deliver training to participating Grade 3 teachers and prepare them to use the Grade 3 teacher’s guides and to support their students in using complementary reading materials as a part of Grade 3 instructional offerings. This work will pave the way for broader support to more students beyond Grades 1 and 2, so that positive curricular design and learning content benefit more students in more grades.

Create more reading content for children

To date, we have published more than 350 original and adapted children’s books in Nepal. In an effort to continue building our growing collection of children’s books and support local capacity building in the book development sector, we will collaborate with two local publishers to support the development of 10 new co-creation titles.

Room to Read will also work alongside the local governments of four districts to co-create eight new storybook titles in 2025. To facilitate this work, we will hold the role of the leading technical expert, conducting writers’ and illustrators’ workshops to guide the book creation process. With much of Room to Read’s storybook collection and reading resources available digitally via Literacy Cloud, we will finalize and print a Literacy Cloud user guide along with a video guide to further increase access and use of the platform in Nepal. Once ready, we will disseminate the Literacy Cloud user guide through teacher trainings, parent meetings and various social platforms to broaden access and bolster engagement.

Leverage delivery structures to benefit more children in more places

In 2025, we will scale our Literacy Program in Nepal to benefit early learners in 100 new schools, including schools in Kapilvastu, a new district for programming in the Lumbini province. This programmatic expansion will result in active partnerships with 72 municipal-level governments (palikas) across seven districts, with an average of 50 program schools in each palika.

Looking ahead, Room to Read aims to leverage strong government partnerships in these regions to reach nearly 90 percent of public primary schools located within these palikas, supporting long-term goals to achieve national scale and facilitate local absorption of the program via technical assistance.

Room to Read in Nepal

Gender Equality

Launch a co-ed life skills curriculum for adolescents

In 2025, Room to Read will begin delivering a co-ed life skills curriculum. The curriculum will be rolled out in several initial districts, with some being led by social mobilizers and others by local teachers, exploring different opportunities to scale this work more quickly.

By expanding the life skills curriculum to be co-ed, we will engage all adolescents in transformative sessions throughout their time in secondary school that will help them to build crucial skills that will prepare them to succeed, such as resilience, collaboration and critical thinking.

Gather research and insights to build tomorrow’s climate leaders

With climate change affecting communities worldwide, educating young people on climate literacy and gender justice has become more crucial than ever. Recognizing this need, Room to Read developed hands-on Climate Justice Clubs to equip adolescents with the knowledge and skills to address the climate crisis in their communities. The clubs in Nepal have been piloted for the past two years in 12 schools located in the Banke district, and were wrapped up in 2024. In 2025, Room to Read will conduct an endline study of the finished pilot, adding to preliminary findings and informing future efforts to share the climate justice curriculum more broadly.

To that end, Room to Read will expand implementation of the climate justice clubs to the Khajura Palika of Banke district in five schools, paving the way for more scaling of this work in the future. 

Explore Our Work in Nepal