Schooling and development: global discourses and women’s narratives from Nepal

ABSTRACT

Education is a privileged area of the dominant development model in Nepal, specifically focusing on women in rural areas. This article analyses the discursive construction of development and education categories in Nepal by exploring the narratives of Nepali women on education and development as lived experiences. It shows how global and institutional discourses are internalised by people as outcomes of cognitive imperialism but it also reveals how women negotiate, re-signify and challenge such discourses from their local realities as active producers of cultural meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• development
• Nepal
• gendered narratives
• discourses

Acknowledgments

Ms. Injina Panthy, research assistant.

Mr. David Curto, field researcher in the first stage of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We understand discourse from a critical approach as both intentional communication and social interaction that reveals the institutions or the subjects’ positions within power relations embodying, reproducing, contesting or transforming them (van Dijk 1993).

2. New couples usually settle down with the husband’s family. Therefore the wives’ families do not see investment in education as valuable.

3. Nepali Political system (1960–1990) characterised by integrationist policies.

4. Term from Allen and Pfaff-Czarnecka 1997 (in Davis and Phyak 2012, 5).

5. Global commitment from World Education Forum (Dakar, 2000) towards quality of education, ensuring access to formal schooling and eliminating gender disparities (UNESCO 2000).

6. Key global lending mechanism for pooled funding in education. Currently Global Partnership for Education (see UNGEI 2012).

7. The names used in this paper are pseudonyms. We maintain Gaun’s ethnic diversity in our interviews, although the results are not analysed from that perspective. Dawa, Pemba, Mingma, Dolma, and Jangmu belong to the Sherpa ethnic group; Amita to the Basnet (Kshetriya); Anju to the Shrestha (Newar); Indira and Sunita to the Magar; and Kami to the Tamang ethnicity.

8. Water pipes break often, and villagers must frequently take long treks to solve it, meanwhile remaining without running water.

9. The Nepal-Lesotho analogy is useful here because of their similitudes as cases (Pigg 1993).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundació Autònoma Solidaria (FAS-UAB) [Call E2014-2015, Grant number E1415-01].