STEAM Education Nepal: Strengthening Young Nepali Girls Through Access to STEAM Educational Programmes

Principal Investigator: Dr Alessandra Campoli (OU)
Co-Investigator(s): Dr Prithvi Shrestha (OU), Ms Melina Tuladhar, Mr Pallab Shrestha and Mr Denjing Tamang (Impact Hub Kathmandu/FabLab Nepal)
Project partner: Impact Hub Kathmandu
Focus country: Nepal
Project start and end date: February 2024 - November 2025.

The project is a pilot study funded by the Open Societal Challenges Programme and aimed at promoting STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, Mathematics) education in Community and Government (CG) schools in Nepal, with a focus on girls from low-income families.

Female students still face an opportunity deficit in Nepal as they are more likely to be sent to CG schools (as opposed to private schools), most of which do not have the necessary infrastructure, resources and skilled teaching staff to provide their students with the required skills to function and succeed in the modern world, to progress to higher education studies or discover and pursue their interests. Despite considerable gains in education enrolment over the past fifteen years, concerns about equality remain. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns further exacerbated the discrepancy between private and CG school children due to the requirement of online learning platforms unavailable to CG schools and students.

The project’s vision is to encourage gender equality in the education sector in Nepal through:

Co-designing, prototyping, delivering and evaluating a portable STEAM education kit that students can access at school and that can be holistically integrated into the existing curriculum
Providing CG school teachers with adequate training to run STEAM classes and use the STEAM kit independently, under the initial supervision of the project team
Adapting and developing the kit and identifying strategies for the schools to build the confidence to produce their own STEAM education toolkits, making schools more resilient.

The long-term goal of the project is to give equal access to STEAM education to a more significant number of CG schools, including those in more remote regions of Nepal, through scaling up the initial project and after monitoring and evaluating the impact, strengths and areas for improvement of the kit and teacher training co-designed in this pilot study.