According to a report on a national assessment of early reading, supported by USAID in 2014, 34% of second-graders and 19% of third-graders could not read a single word of Nepali. In fact, Nepali is the national language but a large part of the population speaks the language of their ethnic group as their mother tongue. However, the school is given in the Nepalese language, by teachers who do not necessarily come from the same ethnic group.

With the support of ONGD-FNEL, OLE Nepal is developing interactive digital platform to help early graders develop their basic reading and comprehension skills. They are creating and curating original stories for the platform, to help young learners through the use of familiar images and word references. 

The game is based on local stories conveyed orally and on indigenous traditions in order to directly integrate local realities and cultures with which children can identify, and allow better learning.

Some examples:

• Meezan: Meezan is a free-spirited sensitive young boy who finds joy from his unconditional friendships with animals, fishes, birds. The protagonist is a refreshing change from the usual depiction of how a young boy is. This is also further reiterated by the particular location of the fishing community that he belongs to.
• Rayo ko Saag: The learning of the days of the week is made highly engaging through the humorous use of actions in different animals that are otherwise associated with humans.
• Bag bhari ko Rahar: Due to financial constraints, Fulmaya’s family can afford to send only one child to school, and consequently, it is her younger brother who gets the opportunity. It is a scenario that is familiar to the author as she, too, hails from a similar background.
• A drag and drop game to teach learners about words through the relevance of audio, texts, and images. In this game, the users have to identify the given image and the sound and drag and drop the given letters to form the correct word.
• A simplified crossword puzzle, where the users will be given visual and audio hints to guide them to drag and drop the correct letters in the puzzle. The words selected for the puzzles have been extracted from EGR stories themselves in hopes of reinforcing what they had learned in the story.

The platform is accessible free of charge and for free download here: https://katha.olenepal.org/ 

The content is also available on the learning portal of the Center for Education and Human Resource Development (CEHRD) of the Nepalese Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST). This portal, set up by the government following the first confinement and the closure of schools, has given much more visibility to the content produced by OLE Nepal.