Caste and Education in Nepal

An interesting study by the World Bank on educational achievement in Nepal is reported in the very-informative, highly-commendable blog of Freidrich Huebler (hat tip to the resourceful Bayesian Heresy). Nepal is poor: GDP per head is around $300, secondary school attendance is 30% (less than 1 in 3 kids attend secondary school), primary school attendance is 74% and life expectancy is 60 years. It is a country with an overwhelming Hindu majority, clearly stratified into dozens of hereditary, mutually-exclusive groups, called castes: the Brahman caste (priests and scholars) ranks top, followed by the Kshatriya (rulers and warriors), Vaishya (merchants), Sudra (peasants and manual workers), and the Dalits (untouchables). The following tables from Huebler show clear disparities in school attendance across castes/ethnic groups:

Who is black?

Superficially, because of the multitude of races, Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society - V.S. Naipaul

The Miami Herald has a five-part series on Afro-Latin Americans (hat tip to Kyle de Beausset). They are absolute must-reads, if anything to understand the power of history on the lives of people in former colonies. From Nicaragua to Brazil, through Cuba, Honduras and the United States, the same message: one’s colour often determines one’s life achievement. And in response to the feeling of inferiority (real, because of under-achievement in many walks of life, or imaginary), non-white people have developed a strategy which transcends continents: act white.