Kathmandu, September 6

The government is all set to achieve cent per cent adult literacy by December, 2015.

Babu Ram Poudel, director, Non-Formal Education Centre, said today that 92.5 per cent Nepali citizens between 15 and 60 years of age have already become literate. “Thus, our target is to make the remaining citizens literate by the end of 2015 as per our commitment in international forums.”

In 2000, at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, the government of 164 countries, including Nepal, had agreed on the Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments, launching an ambitious agenda to reach six wide-ranging education goals by 2015.

Adult literacy was one of the goals of Education For All-2015.

As per the commitment, Nepal prepared a national plan of action to achieve the targeted goals and launched National Literacy Campaign to eradicate illiteracy from the country.

Nepal government began the campaign in the fiscal year 2008/09 with the slogan ‘know letters, be civilized’ to eradicate illiteracy from the country within two years. There were 7.8 million illiterate people in the country then and the government failed to meet the target.

The NFEC conducted an illiteracy survey in 2010 and found that a total of 5,173,979 Nepali citizens (3,435,336 women and 1,738,643 men) were still illiterate. Thus, the campaign was continued as Literate Nepal Mission.

From the year 2010 to 1014, of the 5,173,979 illiterates, the NFEC succeeded in making only 4,788,082 adults literate. There are still 385,897 illiterate adults in the country.

“We are going to conduct literacy classes to incorporate all those who were not covered during the literacy campaigns in the past,” said Poudel. He said the government was not going to allocate more funds for the campaign as it has already spent the budget.