We believe that every child deserves a quality education. This includes children who face additional barriers to education because of cultural attitudes around gender or ability, physical barriers like disability and children with no family support.
Child-friendly learning environments and improved teaching methods, coupled with a supportive community enable all children – especially the vulnerable – to attend and succeed in school. We work to improve education systems for everyone at the same time, making sure marginalised children receive the extra support they need to progress.
Key facts
Championing girls’ education
Link’s Girls’ Education Challenge project reached 62,700 girls in 123 Ethiopian schools to improve their learning, attendance and retention. Our final results against the project’s targets showed a 197% improvement in reading fluency assessment scores and a 301% improvement in numeracy assessment scores among participants.
Our holistic model of support addressed barriers to girls’ education from all angles:
- Tutorial classes and gender responsive pedagogy to enhance academic performance
- Guidance and counselling to boost self-esteem
- Community attitude change to encourage learning for girls
- Improved district and school capacity to support girls’ education
There is a change in community attitudes. People start to believe. Girls’ education becomes society’s education. Education is the only way to overcome poverty.
Zone Education Manager, EthiopiaThe success of this project led on to our current STAGES project (Supporting the Transition of Adolescent Girls Through Enhancing Systems) that aims to further break down the barriers girls in rural Ethiopia face to completing their education.
Additionally, our current TEAM Girl Malawi (Transformational Empowerment of Adolescent Marginalised Girls in Malawi) project is applying our knowledge and experience gained in Ethiopia to empower marginalised girls and support their transition into further education, training or employment.
Promoting inclusion
Inclusive education means balancing all children’s rights in relation to education, giving them the best chance of taking an active part in society as adults. In Malawi, we created additional learning centres that complement the main education system to support excluded children and help them catch up with their learning to return to mainstream education.
In Uganda, we supported the Literacy and School Support Intervention to improve children’s literacy in their mother tongue in the rural district of Buliisa. Working within the existing education system, the aim was to improve teaching and learning for all children in the district through better local language literacy, promoting the inclusion of children who spoke a minority language.
Supporting social and emotional learning
Social and emotional skills are as important as literacy and numeracy to empower all children – and girls in particular – to complete school and move forward to further education or sustainable livelihoods. That’s why the teaching of life skills, health awareness and vocational skills are a key focus of many of our projects alongside the more traditional aspects of education. This includes additional tutorials for girls with disabilities who may otherwise miss out on this vital education due to gender bias and discrimination in the provision of education.