In Malawi, the numbers tell a challenging story. Eighty-six percent of young people of secondary school age have no access to education at all. Of those who do make it through primary school, fewer than thirty percent proceed to public secondary education — and just four percent of secondary graduates ever reach tertiary study.
Red Educativa Perú works toward an education system where every child — regardless of geography or background — is not only enrolled in school, but actively heard within it. Our mission is to strengthen the capacities of local education actors to generate and use evidence for equitable change.
In the provinces of Ascope and San Marcos, two challenges defined our starting point:
Despite existing student council structures, decisions about school life were consistently made without meaningful input from students themselves.
Education authorities had no local data on the degree to which students participated in governance — making it impossible to advocate for change.
Our collaboration with the Center for Universal Education brought two things we could not have built alone:
Across both research sites, the collaborative process generated tangible results at multiple levels:
Shifts We Have Witnessed
Taking This Work Forward. The evidence is there. The relationships are built. The next step is to bring this work to scale — not by replicating a model, but by equipping more local actors to lead their own version of it.
We will facilitate a co-design process with three additional provinces to adapt the toolkit and youth co-researcher approach, targeting at least 15 new schools by 2026.
