Abstract

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Introduction

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Education system in Nepal

Appraisal of COVID-19 impacts in Nepalese education system

Future perspectives and conclusion

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The academic sectors are badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic globally. The studies regarding the implications of COVID-19 in education in Nepal were minimal, thus, this paper aims to highlight the impacts of the pandemic on the education sector of Nepal. It is revealed that the Nepalese academia has been facing problems due to lack of adequate and appropriate sustainable infrastructure for the online system, including skilled human resources. In addition, limited internet facilities in remote and rural areas were the other challenging tasks for virtual academic activities. Therefore, the concerned stakeholders should provide necessary services and appropriate strategies for virtual means of the education system to compensate the repercussion caused by the pandemic. This study could be helpful to identify the critical needs emerged due to the pandemic at present and in future and also contribute to adopt appropriate policy for the revival of educational institutions.

۱٫ Introduction

The year 2020 was started with the terror of the COVID-19 and witnessed the indelible imprints of the pandemic on the global community (WHO, 2020). The global health emergency due to COVID-19 was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 30th January 2020. Subsequently, it was declared a pandemic after more than 118,000 infected population by COVID-19 from 114 countries with 4,291 deaths up to 11th March 2020. Globally, up to 6th August 2021, there have been over 200 million confirmed cases, including the deaths over 42 million (WHO, 2021).

WHO recommended the countries across the world to take precautionary measures to break the transmission chain of the coronavirus (Barkur and Vibha Kamath, 2020). Among the different prevention strategies, the lockdown was considered as one of the best approaches for interrupting transmission, which was widely adopted by the global community (Flaxman et al., 2020). Therefore, many of the countries in the world imposed lockdown throughout the national and regional levels. In the same line, the Government of Nepal (GoN) also announced the first lockdown on 24th March 2020 and continued for about six months (Basnet et al., 2021a, Basnet et al., 2021b). Besides the lockdown, effective tracking, tracing, quarantine, social distancing, and hygienic behaviours of some countries such as China controlled the disease spread successfully (Basnet et al., 2021c). However, the lockdown has not been sufficient in many countries (Zhu et al., 2020).