Girls' Education Challenge

Our FCDO-funded Girls’ Education Challenge programme, Wachisana Wetu Wafaulu, was a holistic, six-year project specifically designed to strengthen the transition of vulnerable girls from primary into either secondary school or alternative, productive livelihood pathways, which ended in 2023. Our work focused on the most marginalised girls in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) and the poorest urban areas in the country.   

Having reached over 160,000 girls over the lifetime of the programme, Wachisana Wetu Wafaulu equipped girls and boys, teachers and leaders with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to build a more gender-equitable society.  

As well as improving academic outcomes by providing training and professional development to over 2000 teachers (resulting in improved pupil assessment scores in both literacy (11%) and numeracy (12%) by 2023), the programme developed girls’ awareness of their own socio-emotional wellbeing, resilience and sexual and reproductive health – knowledge that helps them remain in education.  Girls on the programme scored highly on the life skills index (at 88%) and the percentage of girls reporting feeling confident in their schooling increased from 68.5% at the start of the project to 87.9% by 2023.