Improving learning outcomes for 1 million marginalised girls

The Girl’s Education Challenge (GEC) is a global £300 million DFID challenge fund to improve educational outcomes for girls by triggering and scaling up successful innovation among the private sector and NGOs. The focus for the project is not simply ensuring that the use of a challenge fund would enable more girls to have access to learning opportunities, but that girls would remain in schools for long enough to transform their social and economic opportunities.

The GEC currently has 27 projects working in 15 countries, many in areas severely affected by conflict. Projects were selected through an open and transparent process and assessed for their ability to implement new and effective ways to get girls into school, keep them there and make sure they receive a good quality education in ways which are sustainable beyond the GEC funding.

Leave No Girl Behind was announced in July 2016 as part of the second phase of the GEC. The Leave No Girl Behind initiative intends to reach up to  270,000  highly marginalised girls and will support essential interventions to provide literacy, numeracy and skills relevant for life and work. The first phase (GEC I) directly provided quality education for over a million marginalised girls.

Leave No Girl Behind projects will help tackle harmful social and gender norms that contribute to girls being out of school in multiple countries across Africa and South Asia. They will address complex circumstantial barriers that have led to these high levels or marginalisation which include; girls with disabilities, orphaned girls, child brides, young mothers, nomadic girls, refugees, victims of gender-based violence and modern-day slavery, and girls living in extreme poverty.

The GEC is managed on behalf of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in alliance with Nathan Associates Ltd. and Social Development Direct Ltd.

Nathan has played a key role in setting up the GEC fund by providing both challenge fund and education expertise and technical support for setting up the monitoring and evaluation framework. Nathan plays a central role in the delivery, management, and further development of the GEC evaluation.

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