Reimagining secondary education with the most marginalised girls

Here I Am partnered with Malala Fund and girls to design and deliver a global consultation that heard from more than 800 girls and young women to develop a new vision for secondary education.

The Girls’ Vision for Education invited adolescent girls and young women to share their experiences through 76 qualitative workshops and a far reaching online consultation.

Malala Fund committed to “work with girls in all their diversity to co-create and launch an agenda for quality, gender-equal education” during the 2021 Generation Equality Forum, in line with their strategic objective (2020-2025) to improve education quality. This consultation is a critical step towards that objective.

The objective of the consultation was to hear a new vision for a secondary education that meets the needs, wants and dreams of the most marginalised girls. It focused upon their ideas and aspirations for how to make education better for girls like them, both in their experience of education and in the outcomes that it can create for girls.

In order to consult the widest range of the most marginalised girls, the consultation included the voices of;

• Girls living in areas affected by conflict
• Girls in refugee settlements
• Girls from harder-to-reach rural areas
• Girls with reduced access to formal education
• Girls survivors of child marriage, child labour or/and child exploitation
• Girls with visual and hearing impairments
• Girls with reduced mobility

The hope is for girls’ opinions to help shape global education policy.

Malala Fund and Here I Am share in their ambition to put young women voices at the centre of their work, and this consultation was very much centred around that goal.

Malala Fund appointed three Malala Fund Girl Programme Fellows as Girls’ Vision Leads: Meti T. Gemechu, Dr. Ayesha Kareem and Tamilore Omojola. Here I Am collaborated closely with these brilliant young women at every stage of the project, alongside a steering committee of young women that helped finalise the design of the project, conduct background research, pilot and implement workshops and response analysis.

This young woman-led approach was critical to the value that the consultation was able to deliver: their input guided the approach, content, tone and implementation of the consultation, ensuring it was appropriate and engaging for the target audience.

As part of the design process we conducted a pilot in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Pakistan. The pilot was conducted by the Girls’ Vision Leads, with girls recruited by themselves. This was an important step in the design process as it uncovered complexities in the activities and scheduling that needed adapting to suit the needs of the target audience.

76 Workshops were conducted across 12 countries in Summer 2024, and were designed in partnership with the Girls’ Vision Leads, Steering Committee and facilitated by Girls’ Vision partner organisations*, using the agenda, activity canvases and facilitation guidance that we provided. Each session lasted 3 hours, with an average of 5 - 7 girls.

Workshops included discussion, drawing and physical activities to engage girls in a playful and varied agenda. Projective exercises such as "Imagine a Girl" asked participants to draw a girl, like themselves and give her a name. This allowed them to discuss their experiences indirectly by focusing on their imagined persona.

Physical activities such as ‘Power Walk’ encouraged girls to explore what it would be like to be someone making decisions in education.

Workshops took participants on a journey through their current barriers to education, to their aspirations for change. They concluded with two activity canvases summarising participants’ combined vision for education.

The objective of the online consultation was to extend the reach of consultation. Girls completed the online survey on Typeform, following a storytelling narrative to allow them to create their vision for girls’ education. After completing the survey, the girls’ answers were played back to them in a paragraph compiling a summary of their very own vision for education.

The online consultation was distributed through targeted dissemination to partner organisations with access to our target audience of girls, and via promotion on Malala Fund’s Instagram. It ran for three weeks, in Summer 2024, and was available in seven languages.

Once the consultation had concluded around the world, the Here I Am team began analysis of the findings across the two methodologies. The themes that emerged through the Girls’ Vision for Education could be divided into three categories; Needs, Wants and Dreams.

• Needs: These are fundamental requirements for a girl to be able to go to school
• Wants: These are significant requirements that enable a girl to succeed at school
• Dreams: These are aspirations that girls have shared as their vision for education

In categorising the vision in this way, we were able to observe the fundamental aspects of education that are currently inadequate, whilst also examining the more visionary ideas for how girls dream their education could be.

Malala Fund then finalised the analysis by conducting deep dives into the data and a validation process with girls, young women leaders and Girls’ Vision partners. Find out what girls shared, how global decision-makers can deliver on girls’ needs and Malala Fund’s efforts to unlock resources for girls’ education in the Girls’ Vision report. A short summary of the report is also available here.

*We’d like to thank the Girls’ Vision partner organisations who facilitated the workshops with marginalised girls: AfyaPlus Organization, Girl Child Africa Foundation, Roots and Wings ELIXIR, Save the Children South Sudan, World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), World YWCA, and Zindagi Trust