Background
The Empowerment and Development for Girls’ Education (EDGE) project is a four-year initiative funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and delivered by the British Council.
EDGE operates at national, provincial, district and school levels in Zambia, collaborating closely with the Ministry of Education and local partners to advance gender equality and ensure that girls not only enrol in school but flourish academically, socially and economically in safe, inclusive learning environments.
Vision
EDGE pursues a holistic approach centred on policy engagement, leadership capacity building, stakeholder collaboration and evidence generation. By working alongside Ministry directorates, professional associations and teacher-training institutions, the project seeks to influence and refine education policies, embed gender-responsive leadership standards, co-design sustainable training pathways and underpin all interventions with robust, context-relevant research. Safeguarding and professional ethics are woven throughout these efforts to reinforce learner protection and inclusive practice.
How it operates
Since its inception, EDGE has convened policy dialogues with senior education officials to ensure that national reforms reflect classroom realities, delivered leadership orientation programmes and established peer-mentoring networks for head teachers and system managers across all provinces, co-developed in-service training curricula with institutions such as the David Livingstone College of Education, and produced a series of research briefs and toolkits that guide curriculum development, monitoring tools and professional development materials.
Impacts
Early results demonstrate that national guidance on school leadership and safeguarding has been shaped by EDGE’s evidence-based recommendations, school leaders have embraced inclusive practices and adopted a “100 per cent success” mindset to foster educational equity, partner organisations have incorporated EDGE’s model work plans into their standard offerings, and policymakers now draw on a strengthened evidence base to make data-driven decisions that elevate girls’ educational outcomes.
Recommendations
To consolidate and extend these gains, EDGE advises scaling up the peer-mentor framework to maintain leadership support without over-reliance on central teams, embedding integrated follow-up systems to monitor the application of work plans and safeguarding protocols, clarifying supervisory roles across education
directorates to reduce fragmentation, empowering district-level teams to lead implementation for enhanced scalability, and ensuring that child-protection measures remain a non-negotiable element in all leadership and teacher development activities.
Call for Partnerships
As EDGE enters its final months, the British Council warmly invites government agencies, donor partners, civil-society organisations and academic institutions to join us in institutionalising these successes. Through collaborative design of in-service programmes, expansion of peer-mentor networks and integration of EDGE-developed resources into national systems, together we can secure high-quality, gender-equitable learning environments for every girl in Zambia and establish a replicable model of girls’ empowerment for the wider region.