After years of organising, coalition-building and policy engagement, civil society groups in Brazil helped shape a major new education law. Now the next phase begins: making sure its promises reach the girls most excluded from school.
Brazil has passed a major new education law after years of pressure from civil society — a significant milestone for education in the country and a powerful example of what local advocacy can achieve. On April 14, 2026, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Brazil’s National Education Plan (PNE) into law, setting the country’s education priorities for the next decade. For Malala Fund’s partners in Brazil, this moment was the result of years of advocacy, research and coalition-building to help shape the national framework that will guide education policy across the country.
“The importance of the new National Education Plan 2026–2036 for girls’ right to education in Brazil will be measured not only by its goals for universal access, but by its boldness to finance and implement policies for student retention and equitable quality,” said Andressa Pellanda, general coordinator for Campanha Nacional pelo Direito à Educação, Brazil’s largest education coalition and a Malala Fund grantee since 2020.
A major part of that progress was driven by local partners and allied civil society organisations. Campanha helped lead a major effort to shape the plan’s final text. Lawmakers fully or partially adopted roughly 70% of amendments proposed by a coalition led by Campanha, working alongside 25 organisations — including Malala Fund partners Centro de Cultura Luiz Freire, Cedeca Ceará, Instituto Odara, Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra and Ação Educativa.
The success in Brazil shows what's possible when local organisations can mobilise to shape the rules, financing and accountability systems to deliver better outcomes for girls' education at scale. Supporting local partners to catalyse systems change is a key component of Malala Fund’s five-year strategy to get more girls in school.
The wins for girls
The law includes important gains. It commits Brazil to gradually increase education investment from 7% to 10% of GDP over 10 years. It also strengthens attention to access, quality and student retention in Indigenous, quilombola and rural communities, where girls face overlapping barriers including poverty, racism, gender discrimination and school-related violence. The final text also reinforces laws requiring the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history and culture in schools. Together with two other recent legal wins secured by Campanha, the PNE helps build a stronger legal architecture for education in Brazil.
One of the clearest examples of that progress is the financing target. Brazil’s previous National Education Plan also aimed to reach 10% of GDP in education spending, but that goal was never met. The new law again sets a path to 10% — this time through a phased approach with built-in reviews to strengthen accountability.
“By pairing a phased increase in funding with regular reviews, Brazil is demonstrating a more serious commitment to delivering on its education goals,” said Parampreet Singh, Chief of External Affairs at Malala Fund. “Brazil’s renewed focus on sustained education financing is a win for girls in the country and sends an important signal globally of what it will take to resource every girl’s right to 12 years of education.”
The gaps in addressing race and gender
At the same time, the new law also shows why advocacy does not end when a law passes. Before the PNE was approved, lawmakers removed language that would have explicitly committed the education system to addressing ethnic-racial relations, gender education, sexuality education, human rights and anti-ableist education in full-time school curricula. Those omissions matter because they weaken the policy framework needed to fully respond to the realities facing the girls most excluded from education.
For the girls Malala Fund’s partners serve — Afro-descendant, quilombola and Indigenous adolescents in Brazil’s north and northeast — those gaps are especially serious. A plan that does not name gender cannot fully address why girls leave school. A plan that does not name race cannot fully respond to the discrimination that compounds exclusion. And a plan that does not name either makes it harder to design policy, direct funding and build accountability around the girls most affected.
“We are incredibly proud of what our partners achieved in getting the National Education Plan approved,” said Mariana Monteiro, Malala Fund’s partnership manager for Brazil. “But we are also very aware that the race and gender commitments that several of our partners were pushing for are absent — to the detriment of the Black, quilombola and Indigenous girls who are most likely to be out of school.”
“The failure to commit to confronting gender- and race-based violence in education policy undermines girls’ school trajectories — particularly those of Black girls,” said Suelaine Carneiro, executive director of education and research at Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra. “Civil society therefore reaffirms the importance of keeping these issues on the agenda.”
Implementing the law
That is why the passage of the PNE is not the end of the work, but the start of a new phase. States and municipalities must now draft their own education plans in alignment with the national framework. Civil society groups will also need to keep pushing during the plan’s biennial review process, especially with Brazil heading into presidential and congressional elections in October 2026. What happens next will determine whether the law’s promises translate into better schools, stronger retention and real opportunity for the girls most likely to be excluded from education.
“We know real change depends on what happens after the law passes,” said Mariana. “And we look forward to supporting our civil society partners as they hold governments accountable and support communities in insisting that commitments translate into classrooms, teachers and opportunities.”