Increasing the number of girls that attend school and complete a high-quality education results in improved health and economic opportunities for entire communities and countries. Currently, 129 million girls are out of school and barriers to education, such as poverty, child marriage, and gender-based violence, vary by country, according to UNICEF. Educating women and girls is a core component of Rise Up’s mission, and we are deeply committed to growing and scaling our education work. We are proud to highlight the next phase of our partnership with Echidna Giving – a long-term partner that supports our work to educate girls for a more gender equitable world. Since 2019, Echidna Giving has invested in Rise Up to go deeper on advancing girls’ education in Africa and South Asia, supporting more local education leaders and their strategies for change, to build a stronger ecosystem to advance girls education globally. 

With funding from Echidna Giving, we have partnered with over one hundred local leaders in India, Nigeria and Kenya who have successfully advocated for new laws and policies, allowing over 10 million girls to access and complete primary school around the world. In addition, we have adapted our curriculum and launched cohorts of leaders who are solely focused on girls’ education, including our most recent cohort in Kenya. Rise Up offers in-depth training, resources, and opportunities for education-related advocacy that will impact girls for generations. 

Echidna Giving has also championed Rise Up’s efforts to strengthen its evidence and data. Monitoring and evaluation has played a crucial role in enhancing our programming as we develop best practices and learnings that we can share with partners in the sector. Over time, and with the support of Echidna Giving, Rise Up has been able to identify key learning questions, as part of our Learning Agenda and informed by our most recent external evaluation, that are essential to advancing the field and our work to effectively reach more girls and women.

We are grateful to Echidna Giving for their unwavering commitment to advancing girls’ education and to Rise Up Leaders. We look forward to building on our shared successes and ensuring that more girls receive a quality education – not only to enrich their own futures, but to transform their families, communities and, ultimately, their countries.