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In 2006, a Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) collected data on school attendance in Nepal. A comparison with data from earlier DHS surveys, conducted in 1996 and 2001, shows a steady increase in primary school attendance over the last decade. The primary school net attendance rate (NAR) - the share of children of primary school age who attend primary school - has increased by almost 10 percentage points every five years, from 65 percent in 1996 to 84 percent in 2006. If Nepal can sustain this rate of increase it will reach the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015. The increase in attendance was accompanied by a reduction in disparities between boys and girls, residents of urban and rural areas, and children from different household wealth quintiles (see the graph and table below). Much of the increase in primary school attendance is due to higher attendance rates in rural areas, especially over the period 2001 to 2005, when attendance in urban areas gr...

Millennium Development Goal 3 calls for gender equality and the empowerment of women. One aspect of gender equality is literacy among men and women. In June 2007, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released new statistics on adult literacy and youth literacy . The adult literacy rate represents the population aged 15 years and older and the youth literacy rate the population aged 15 to 24 years. The most recent literacy data is from the year 2005. Figure 1 compares the male and female literacy rates in 135 countries. The male literacy rate is plotted along the horizontal axis and the female literacy rate along the vertical axis. For each country, up to two points are drawn, one for adult literacy and one for youth literacy. The location of a country relative to the 45 degree line indicates whether more men or women are literate. If the literacy rate of men and women is the same, the country's marker is located on the 45 degree line. If the male literacy rate is higher tha...