With a population of about 30 million people - a third living below the poverty line - Nepal is the 7th poorest nation in the world.⁴ Decades of political instability, as well as gender, caste, ethnic and religious inequalities contribute to a fragmented socio-economic platform in Nepal.

For more than one third of the rural population, it takes four hours or more to get to the nearest all-weather road. This poor infrastructure makes it hard for rural Nepalese villagers to access resources. So while primary education is hypothetically free in Nepal, 40.9% of adults still can’t read. Schools are often inaccessible and have no books for a library or resources for a computer lab, and 98.3% of Nepalese don’t have Internet access.³

READ has its roots in Nepal, where our first office opened in 1991 after a rural villager told our founder that all he wanted for his village was a library. Since then we have opened 49 Community Library and Resource Centers, offering more than a million rural villagers access to much-needed educational tools and resources, and helping them work towards brighter futures. With our partner communities, we have seeded for-profit enterprises to sustain READ Centers in Nepal that address community needs: from fish farming and turmeric farming to a community radio station.

In 2006, READ Nepal won the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award. This prestigious and competitive award included $1M to further expand READ's sustainable rural development model and extend its capacity to provide information technology resources throughout remote regions of Nepal.

To learn more about READ's work in Nepal, check out some great short clips on our Videos page, including a film celebrating READ's 20th anniversary in Nepal.

Our Focus in Nepal