This picture of kids learning in Nepal is from SEEDmagazine.com. It is a glimpse of the cascading connectivity of the world’s newest generation with the internet now underway. From the SEED article:
Rabi Karmacharya is young, handsome and charismatic — and he is a man on a mission. The MIT-educated IT engineer from Silicon Valley has returned to his native Kathmandu with an ambitious goal: to give the poorest kids in one of the poorest nations a chance at a good education. . . .
Less than half of Nepalis are literate — 45% according to government figures. And this figure doesn’t reflect “functional literacy rates,” which measure whether a person can read and write well enough to function in literate society. Of the country’s eight million school-age children, 84% attend primary school; by age 11 half have dropped out.
Twelve years of insurgency and conflict have left Nepal’s new Maoist government with more than a crippled education system to deal with — when we meet, Rabi and I are forced to huddle around candles, as the government has imposed daily 14-hour power outages.
“We simply cannot wait for the government to deliver high-quality education. We’re losing another generation,” Rabi says. “But we’re working hard with the education department and government ministries to ensure that they take ownership of the project. In three to four years, we want to hand this over to them.”
