Education is vital to improving lives across a range of areas: whether it be in health, sanitation or gender equality, access to education leads to better outcomes and brighter futures.

Where poverty exists, we’re building schools, providing textbooks and improving school facilities while fostering community involvement in the way schools are managed. We’re working with teachers to develop new ways of improving the quality of children’s education.

On average, girls are more likely than boys not to attend school, or to drop out early. Yet educated girls earn more, are healthier, and are far less likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth. They are more likely to have children later in life, when they will be far more equipped to protect themselves and their children from malnutrition.

Ensuring that girls and boys stay in school is an investment over the course of their lives, the lives of their families and their communities, and vital to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Fast Facts

• There are 31 million girls of primary-school age out of school.
• 2/3 of illiterate people in the world are women.
• More than 1 in 4 children in developing regions entering primary school is likely to drop out.
• For every year a girl spends in school, as an adult she raises her family’s income by 10–20%.

In Cambodia, we’re helping children from remote ethnic groups go to school and learn in their native language for the first time, ensuring girls attend school alongside their brothers. Building on over a decade of work, the project’s incredible success has seen it adopted by the Cambodian Government, and replicated in state schools across the country’s north-east.

In Timor-Leste, we’re producing educational magazines and radio broadcasts to help communities with literacy, numeracy and life skills. Lafaek magazine is the only educational publication in Timor-Leste in the local language, Tetun, and covers topics like geography, language, health, culture and science, and issues such as peace, international affairs and women’s rights.

We’ve been supporting education in Afghanistan for more than 19 years. We’re focused on providing sustainable community-based education for those marginalised children, youth and adults with no access to formal schools. Between 1998 and 2013, we directly helped more than 135,000 students by providing vital access to basic education.