At Link Education, we know that local leadership and ownership are essential for long-term, sustainable and effective change.
Link Education is made up of four partners. Link Malawi and Link Uganda are independently constituted national NGOs governed by their own Board of Trustees, while Link Ethiopia is locally registered and guided by an Advisory Committee of Ethiopian experts. Link International provides technical support and capacity strengthening, and has often played a key role in fundraising.
Link’s national teams have always worked alongside local government officers and community members to design, monitor, adapt and deliver quality education programmes. In 2020 we began reflecting together on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism and strengthened our commitment to localisation.
Our 2020-2030 strategic plan was developed collaboratively following an extensive process of consultation with our stakeholders in the countries where we work. We dissected national Education Plans, Road Maps and Visions, as well as the African Charter 2063 and Sustainable Development Goals. We mapped priorities and overlaid the expertise and capacity of the Link Education family. In this way we were able to define five programmatic areas that faced gaps which matched Link’s experience, and from that our five strategic goals were born.
We began relocating key strategic functions to the countries of delivery, starting with the Knowledge and Impact Manager based in Uganda with responsibility for supporting Link-wide Monitoring Evaluation Accountability and Learning. As capacity has grown within our African partners, capacity strengthening is increasingly happening on a south-to-south basis. For example, the Finance Manager in Uganda trained their newly recruited counterpart in Ethiopia.
In 2025 we made a significant structural change: we replaced the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) role with an International Management Team made up of Executive Directors representing each of our partners in Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda and UK. The International Management Team is responsible for setting and implementing the strategic direction of Link, with shared responsibility and equal decision-making power. We also established a Global Technical Advisory Committee where international experts guide the Link family on partnership opportunities and quality assure our technical support.
We continue to prioritise south-to-south learning which is critical for the sharing of contextualised knowledge, experiences, and best practice. Our Technical Community of Practice meets quarterly to focus on mutual learning around our strategic goals. This fosters mutual understanding empowering partners to address shared challenges more effectively.
We are also enhancing representation from the Global South by prioritising attendance and presenting by colleagues from Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda at international conferences ensuring they have a voice at the table. In 2025 the Executive Directors of Link Malawi and Link Ethiopia presented their work on at the Comparative and International Education Society conference.
Increasingly, our partners in the Global South are leading projects and coordinating consortia in which Link International is a partner. Link Malawi currently leads a multi-country research project to understand government decision-making processes for scaling-up gender, inclusion and safeguarding interventions which is supported by the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, a joint endeavour with the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
We are now pleased to be signatories to the Charter 4 Change, a global initiative for locally-led development. We are working towards further implementation of the Charter’s eight commitments to address imbalances and inequality in the humanitarian system: direct funding, partnership, transparency, recruitment, advocacy, equality, support, and promotion. These are closely aligned with our commitment to being locally led.
We are proud of our progress towards localisation so far, and grateful to our partners for their commitment. But we are not complacent, there is more to do, and we will continue to challenge ourselves on this journey.