Alive News

Karnali Province chief minister Mahendra Bahadur Shahi has spoken of the need of promoting technical education to alleviate poverty and to achieve economic progress in the province.

Addressing the International SOS Day celebrations here Friday, the Chief Minister stressed the need of significant reforms in the existing education system and of connecting it to production and labor. On the occasion, he praised the SOS Village for its contribution to educating children facing social, economic and cultural exclusions.

He also highlighted the role of NGOs in the education development in Nepal, pledging to working together with such NGOs working for good causes.

Province 4 Chief Minister Prithvi Subba Gurung has said poverty is a common problem of all provinces in the country.

In his inaugural speech during the ‘Province-level interaction with local governments for poverty alleviation, entrepreneurship and prosperity’, organized by the Poverty Alleviation Fund here Sunday, he insisted on the need of uprooting poverty.

“No significant change/improvement has been seen in the livelihood of poor in Nepal,” he said, giving his views that identification of real poor with an objective analysis would help take effective measures for poverty alleviation.

He pledged to do the best to reduce the number of poor in the province, underlining the need of cooperation among federal, province and local levels for this.

Province minister for land management, agriculture and cooperatives, Lekh Bahadur Thapa, said poverty alleviation was a challenging issue and modernization of agriculture and development and promotion of entrepreneurship would help reduce poverty.

Poverty Alleviation Fund’s Vice Chairperson Dr YB Thapa expressed the need of making PAF programs more effective in the days ahead as per federal setup.

PAF Executive Director Nahakul KC, however, said Province 4 has relatively low presence of poverty and currently PAF programs are operational in Province’s four districts including  Myagdi, Lamjung, Gorkha and Nawalparasi.

Madhya Nepal municipality Chairman Ramesh Pandey, chair of rural municipality Federation Province 4 Ishwor Pandey, and District Coordination Committee Federation’s Province 4 Member Devendra Bahadur Katuwal highlighted the need of collective efforts and cooperation to end poverty.

Nearly half of Afghanistan’s children are not attending school because of war, poverty and other factors, a new report showed Sunday.

The study, released by the Education Ministry and the U.N. children’s agency, said that 3.7 million, or 44 percent, of all school-age children are not attending school. It marks the first time since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 that the rate of attendance has declined, following years of steady gains in education for boys as well as girls, who were banned from attending school under the Taliban.

The survey says girls account for 60 percent of those being denied an education.

“Business as usual is not an option for Afghanistan if we are to fulfil the right to education for every child,” Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s Afghanistan representative, said in a statement. “When children are not in school, they are at an increased danger of abuse, exploitation and recruitment.”

The Taliban have seized several districts across the country in recent years, as the U.S.-backed government has struggled to combat the insurgency. A long-running financial crisis, exacerbated by widespread corruption, has further hindered government efforts to expand access to education.

Widespread poverty forces many families to push their daughters into early marriages, often with much older men. The legal age for marriage in Afghanistan is 18, but the law is poorly enforced, particularly in conservative, rural areas.

Girls’ education is still frowned upon in much of the conservative Muslim country, and is banned in the steadily expanding areas controlled by the Taliban.