The recent Nepal Living Standards Survey III 2010/2011 indicated the access of only 71.5 % households to the nearest secondary school with huge disparities between urban and rural settings. General statistics on education in Nepal reveal a gender gap. While 39.9 per cent of the male Nepalese population enjoys some secondary education, only 17.9 per cent of female Nepalese population enjoys some secondary education.

Although gender parity in enrolment is now achieved at the national level, girls from remote districts, in the lowest income quintile, and from vulnerable population groups tend to drop out from school, especially in higher grades.  There are a number of barriers accessing education particularly for girls such as level of income, geographical distance, willingness of parents, early marriage, cost of schooling, availability of trained female teachers, gender based violence, learning environment and above all quality of secondary education.  For instance, in the Mid- and Far-Western regions, nearly 66 per cent of the poorest adolescent girls are married before the age of 18 years, while nine per cent of all girls are married before the age of 14 years. Another challenge of the educational sector is the quality of Nepalese education. In 2011, only 45 per cent of grade 10 students from public/community schools passed the School Leaving Certificate examination. This percentage is much lower for girls. Similar situation prevails in the field of literacy for all with serious differences between girls and boys, males and females, urban and rural and income quintiles. 

Although there are many legal provisions now in place regarding the educational participation of all including the disadvantaged, there is still a lack of implementation mechanism to ensure effective translation of the provisions into reality. One problem is that the inertia of social/cultural values tends to override the legal provisions. In particular the quality of gender environment in schools and educational workplaces lacks improvement as gender needs are not even reflected in the education development planning in many instances. Therefore, a crucial need is to review policies, programs and their implementation in practices in order to improve gender equality.