Achieving whole-child development in Nepal: Navigating through equity within diversity and resource limitation in education

Nepal has pursued equitable quality education to meet the 21st-century aspirations, especially those envisioned by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite significant improvement in equitable access to basic schooling, fundamental tasks such as developing literacy, access to basic (quality) education of the dis advantaged population in mainstream education remain tantalizing issues. This chapter reports how the Government of Nepal (GoN) conceptualized quality education and navigated through the contextual features to obtain the common global agenda of whole-child development, especially through the implementation of two large-scale long-term educational reform plans, including the current School Sector Development Plan (SSDP) (2016/2017–2022/2023). Based on critical analysis of the two selected plans, and drawing on Choi’s (2018) framework that identified factors shaping the success of educational reforms, this paper concludes that despite the GoN’s stated aim to seek all-round development of children/youths, including their social and emotional well-being, the two plans largely focused on meeting the impending threshold goal of providing equitable access to primary education for all, while the whole-child development agenda receiving limited attention. Hence, this chapter illustrates the tensions that developing countries like Nepal are facing when pursuing whole-child development, situated within their unique geopolitical, social, economic and religious context