Young people aren't waiting for decision-makers to transform their education, they're leading the charge. This International Day of Education, we’re spotlighting youth-designed solutions that turn girls’ rights into real-world change — through policy, financing and accountability.
Urgent, systemic barriers prevent girls from completing their education: child marriage, poverty, conflict, discrimination, shrinking education budgets. After more than a decade leading the global movement for girls’ education, we know no single programme can fix these interconnected challenges. Real change requires systemic solutions — laws, budgets, financing systems and global and national frameworks that strengthen girls' right to education for generations.
We also know young women are uniquely positioned to drive this change. Since our founding, we have seen the returns from investing in them: bold, sustainable and scalable solutions across the most challenging contexts. They understand better than anyone the systems blocking girls from finishing school and have the expertise, networks and determination to transform them.
Through our 2025-2030 strategy, we’re leaning into where our grantmaking can be most catalytic: backing young women-led organisations with more sustained, flexible support that helps move their solutions into policy, budgets and implementation. We directed 66% of our new Education Champion Network funding — over $3 million — to young women-led organisations. This investment is a pillar of our grantmaking, not a side project or pilot initiative.
These partners are securing policies to end child marriage, advocating for safer schools for girls and mobilising students to demand their rights. Our partners are driving a wide range of policy and implementation advances. For International Day of Education, we’re spotlighting three examples with a shared lesson: progress happens when commitments are translated into enforceable policy, funded plans and accountability.
Ending child marriage in Nigeria
In Nigeria, 30% of young women are married before turning 18, and over 50% in the northeast and northwest. Child marriage and education are tightly linked: child marriage pushes girls out of school, while staying in school prevents girls from getting married early.
Through a cohesive national advocacy strategy, Education as a Vaccine, Civil Society Action Coalition on Education for All, YouthHub Africa and Onelife Initiative — three of which are youth-led organisations — are advancing education as a policy solution to ending child marriage by focusing on what implementation requires:
Supporting state implementation of the National Strategy to End Child Marriage through education-linked action plans, including clear pathways for school re-entry.
Generating evidence on what keeps girls out of school — and what will bring them back — so re-entry pathways are designed for real barriers, not assumptions.
Keeping education central in government and civil society responses to child marriage — so commitments translate into action.
Advocating for funding and accountability to turn commitments into measurable results.
Recent analysis by the Accelerate Research Hub shows that scaling community education programmes for unmarried adolescent girls who are out of school in northern Nigeria could reduce child marriage by two-thirds within four years. That’s the opportunity; implementation is the hinge.
Making schools safer for girls in Pakistan
In Pakistan’s rural areas, many girls stop going to school because they fear sexual harassment on their way to class or once they get there. And too often, schools lack systems to prevent abuse or respond effectively when it occurs.
Adolescent girls working with our partner Bedari are calling on policymakers in Punjab to create — and actually enforce — safety measures that protect them in secondary school. They’re documenting their demands and engaging decision-makers to translate policy promise to day-to-day practice.
Thanks in part to their efforts, the Punjab School Education Department is mandating that all public schools form anti-harassment committees — a significant step toward institutionalising protection mechanisms. Now comes the implementation: resourcing, training, oversight and reporting that will enable the committees to function consistently and girls to trust the system enough to use it.
Mobilising Brazilian students to reduce school dropout
When girls can’t properly manage their periods at school because they don’t have access to safe and clean toilets or menstrual products, they miss out on learning — increasing their likelihood of dropping out. In Brazil, one study revealed that menstrual poverty affects 47% of Black girls from low-income families.
Young women-led Associação de Jovens Engajamundo drives the implementation of menstrual dignity policies, working directly with schools and students. Engajamundo’s student volunteers train their peers to understand their rights under existing laws, then support student-led challenges where young people design practical fixes to gaps in menstrual dignity at school. The strongest proposals are elevated to policymakers — creating a clear pathway from lived experience to scalable action.
With a strong presence in Brazil’s north and northeast — regions with high dropout rates for girls — and an active volunteer base of more than 300 young people nationwide, Engajamundo is uniquely placed to mobilise communities to take action for girls’ education. This is what implementation looks like: translating policy into conditions girls can actually learn in.
Co-designing solutions with young people
Evidence shows that policies and solutions designed with young people — not just for them — increase community buy-in and are more likely to be implemented effectively. But co-design is not the finish line, it’s the starting point.
Our partners are doing their part. Now decision-makers must do theirs to advance implementation of youth-designed solutions through law, predictable financing and public accountability — so progress is measured, enforced and sustained.
Young women leaders are essential to achieving the systemic change needed for all girls to complete 12 years of school. They are already building what works. Implementation is the choice.