Social Work Education in Nepal: Major Opportunities and Abundant Challenges

This paper discusses the evolution of social work education in Nepal. The history of social work education and training in Nepal is rather nascent. Imparting social work education and training is a challenging task in Nepal due to the ongoing political instability, multi-cultural issues and lack of social work educators, and the lack of a professional association, in addition to the lack of government recognition for the social work profession in the country. The paper is divided into four sections. After a general introduction, Section 2 discusses the evolution of social work education in the context of the development of higher education in Nepal. The paper describes Nepal and its changing social context, the challenges for social work and how social work education is meeting these challenges. Nepal's efforts to realize indigenous and international practices of social work education are discussed in the third section. The paper indentifies these gaps and a Nepalese model of social work is presented in Section 4. The paper is written on the basis of the author's personal narrative of many years' work in Nepal in order to start a discussion on indigenous and international social work perspectives along with challenges for social work education in the context of the current global climate of social, political and economic changes in order to draw lessons for Nepal and South Asia.