Education for All: Building Brighter Futures
Scholarships open the door. Staying in the room takes something else. What we have learned about keeping students enrolled.
Paying fees removes the most obvious barrier to education. It does not remove the others, and the others are what usually decide whether a student finishes.
The costs nobody budgets for
Travel, materials, examination fees and the income a family gives up by keeping an older child in school often add up to more than tuition itself. A scholarship that covers fees alone can still leave a student unable to attend.
Mentors matter more than we expected
The strongest predictor of a supported student staying enrolled, in our own records, is whether they have one adult outside the family who checks in on them regularly. It is a cheap intervention with a disproportionate effect.
Digital access is now a basic requirement
Coursework, applications and results have moved online faster than device ownership has followed. Shared access at a school or community centre closes most of that gap at a fraction of the cost of individual devices.
Girls' education
Where drop-out is concentrated among girls, the cause is rarely a single one. Safe transport, sanitation and a mentor together shift the numbers; any one of them alone tends not to.
Following through
We stay with supported students through to the end of their course rather than the end of the funding year. It is a slower way to report progress, and a more honest one.
