Community-driven systems change : where is the evidence? Malawi girls' secondary education

What is community-driven systems change?

At Firelight, we believe that for lasting impact and change to be achieved – especially for children and youth - community must be at the center of that change. It must be owned and driven by the community. It must address underlying systems and root causes. In other words, it must be community-driven systems change.

Firelight supports community-driven systems change through a participatory system of grants, mentoring, convening, learning and reflection, which invests in community-based organizations so that they can work with their communities to build and realize their shared visions of sustainable change and true potential for children, youth and community.

You can read more about the community-driven systems change approach here - https://www.firelightfoundation.org/cdsc

We support community-driven systems change because it is more equitable and just and offers solidarity with, rather than charity to or power over. We support it because it is what communities have asked us to do. We also support it because it works.

In this short series, we want to share some of the experiences of our grantee-partners and their communities, and demonstrate how powerful community-driven systems change can be.

To be fair, Firelight’s support for systems change for children and youth has been transforming over the past few years – from what might be called “community-based,” to true “community-driven” and from what might be called support for “community programming,” to support for true “systems change.” As such, not all of the examples we will share reflect 100% community-driven systems change. But we wanted to share what happens when communities DO have agency, so that we can all begin to see how powerful true community-driven systems change can be.

Example One - Community-driven systems change for adolescent girls’ education in Malawi

The first example we want to share is from four Malawian organizations that were supported to look at how to increase girls’ access to, and success at rural secondary schools.

The initiative sought to improve girls’ access to education by addressing the factors that affect girls joining school, their persistence in school, their performance in exams and their transition to higher levels. In doing this, the four Malawian organizations worked with local communities first to explore and then to address the structural impediments that affect girls in school, at home and in the community at large on an everyday basis. The four organizations - along with their communities - were facilitated not only to make their own contributions to girls’ education but also to engage the government to uphold its role in the secondary education of girls.

The barriers to girls’ educational success that were identified by communities were understandably complex. As such, all four organizations were funded to work with their communities - parents, children, traditional leaders, schools and more - over the period of a year, to unpack and understand root causes and influences. Firelight then funded the organizations to support the communities to deal with all of these issues as they saw fit.

It worked. As well as improving school attendance and performance of girls (attendance and performance went up, re-admission rates also went up almost 20-fold and pregnancy related drop-outs went down from 17 to five in one year in just one project), whole communities transformed their own attitudes towards the value of school, created new income for fellow families who had struggled to afford their child’ education and gave girls access new safe spaces, and new confidence in their own futures. Target schools have meanwhile developed valuable School Improvement Plans and communities demanded that the government make good on their promises to provide trained teachers, school supplies and effective classrooms.

On top of all this – as a result of the collective efforts of the communities - there has been significant local and national policy change, with target schools given new status and funding as well as new national investment in infrastructure such as mobile science classrooms.

We invite you to read the full report on the work that the communities did and what they achieved here – Community action to improve girls’ secondary education in Malawi – learnings and outcomes.