These quarterly convenings are critical. This one in particular comes at an opportune moment to gather together as a regional prevention community to offer much needed rays of hope through sharing ongoing innovations to prevent violence and promote gender equality in and through schools across sub-Saharan Africa.

New Members, New Opportunities

We heard from several new members from Francophone and Anglophone Africa including Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa, and introduced new members including FAWE Tanzania, FAWE Zimbabwe, FAWE Ethiopia, the Center for Human Rights in Pretoria, Precious Seed Africa, among others. We were joined by guests from Education Out Loud and the Impact and Innovations Development Center (IIDC).

Opportunities from the Africa Hub Coordinators

Raising Voices spoke to the Africa Hub’s upcoming in-person convening in October, as well as plans to host a continental conference for members innovating around the concept of positive discipline in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Africa Hub’s recently published evidence review, Preventing Violence Through Schools in Sub-Saharan Africa, and policy mapping summary report, Africa’s Commitment to Safer Education – The Policy Landscape for Preventing Violence Against Children in Schools were again shared with members, citing the launch of the full report this month and dissemination of both pieces as a key set of activities for 2025.

Hub Coordinators also encouraged members to take advantage of upcoming opportunities to further unpack the good work being done by members, regardless of VACiS specialty, from LVCT Kenya’s focus on sexual reproductive health and rights for children and youth, to Precious Seed Africa’s focus on positive discipline and the 52 modules of content developed to promote it, to FAWE Africa’s renowned gender responsive pedagogy approach.

We must “locate this agenda of VAC in schools within the education outcomes framework at country and regional level…a focus on positive educational outcomes will survive these [global] shifts – making a case that violence undermines these outcomes is a critical approach that we need to take, to link violence against children with the impacts of educational outcomes.”

Deogratius Yiga, Impact & Innovations Development Centre 

What’s happening in the field of violence prevention in schools

One member from Kenya spoke to a competency-based curriculum developed through Precious Seed Africa, currently being built out into a positive discipline and corporal punishment focused project called Closing The Tap. The project is working with teachers in Teacher Training Colleges (pre-service training) as well as in-service positive discipline training for school personnel on creating safe learning environments. They called for others to collaborate to take this beyond initial two colleges in Kenya to more schools nationwide, and shared a link for a video showcasing this work.

FAWE Tanzania spoke of recent cases of teachers caning children to death, leading to their increased investment in trainings for teachers in positive discipline as well as chains of reporting training for students. These efforts draw from FAWE’s Tuseme model and Gender Responsive Pedagogy model, each of which empowers students to speak out about violence in schools including sexual harassment.

The Tanzania Education Network also released a press statement on the same, which presents an opportunity to leverage the issue of violence in and around schools through the National Plan of Action to End Violence Against Women and Children.

Kukuza Education spoke to their Do It Yourself (DIY) Clubs featuring modules on youth-adult partnerships and gender equitable dynamics. And from Democratic Republic of Congo, Timothy Issa Mtiti work focused on gender equality in school, and shared experience on navigating the deeply entrenched norms that complicate this work. There was a brief discussion of forthcoming opportunities for capacity support for scaling prevention interventions in DRC and that resources would soon be shared.

Amani Girls in Tanzania is also adapting Raising Voices’ Good School Toolkit through a learning exchange hosted by IIDC as a technical partner. She shared about a training of trainers (TOT) last October and their current work piloting a scalable adaptation of the Good School Toolkit, GST Agile, in 80 Tanzanian schools, as well as work with HakiElimu on a recent shared learning event on VACiS and their experience sharing around implementing GST in Tanzania.

Education Out Loud, who supports members like HakiElimu in this work, spoke positively from Oxfam Denmark’s perspective about hearing from the work of other civil society organizations working in the violence prevention space in schools, highlighting the importance of national and international NGOs to collaborate through spaces like this Regional Hub.

Together For Girls spoke to their ongoing support for the VACS surveys in the region, and their work on projects in schools with LVCT and FAWE. They shared their VACS Data Dashboard, an online tool providing easy access to data on violence against children and youth. Researchers, practitioners and policy makers can sort by country where VACS surveys have been conducted across time points using this tool. They also spoke to the current Safe to Learn initiative in Tanzania working with Coalition co-founders HakiElimu and the Government of Tanzania on second round of VACS data collection to understand what happened between the two VACS collection timepoints in 2019 and 2024, and what factors have resulted in reduction in SRGBV.

LVCT Health in Kenya spoke to their systems-strengthening work and their LEARN Project to strengthen prevention and response in schools in Kenya. They detailed LVCT’s current operational research on developing an intervention to help government of Kenya to enhance positive discipline in schools – looking at existing policies and factors that increase learners’ risk of violence and interventions to inform development of a new approach that will be piloted for feasibility and scalability. The approach is looking at pre-service and in-service training opportunities for teachers and how to engage younger students below the age of 12.

Finally, Center for Human Rights in Pretoria, South Africa spoke to ongoing research on boys who have experienced violence in schools, and the Creative Futures Program in Zimbabwe offering career guidance in schools and how they are working to involve teachers, communities and local leaders to amplify this agenda. 

“Continued investment in evidence generation will remain critical and has become even more critical now…we need to make the case that…prevention of violence against children in schools is possible, and that it is beneficial.”

Deogratius Yiga, Impact & Innovations Development Centre

As part of the Coalition’s other two core pillars to advocate and synthesize, Stella Ayo-Odongo, Technical Advisor for the Africa Hub and long-serving expert in the field spoke to her recent policy mapping review of the legislative landscape for violence in and around schools in sub-Saharan Africa. She spoke to the relatively low number of African countries with policies in place that explicitly mention and prohibit violence in schools, and unpacked the need to strengthen the evidence base with regular and robust national level data. Stella spoke to the progress the region has achieved, but highlighted how far we have to go to ensure a regional policy environment that sufficiently prohibits all forms of violence in schools, and how these policies must be coupled with action through one of the many approaches highlighted by members in this meeting. From the review, several key recommendations emerged:

1. Explicitly prohibit all forms of violence in schools in policy: Encourage and support African governments to undertake policy and legal reform to include explicit provisions on VACiS.

2. Strengthen implementation frameworks for national policies, laws and plans including adequately resourcing, with budgetary investments to elevate the quality of schools and how children experience them.

3. Build capacity of duty-bearers: Governments should carry out public awareness campaigns about the impact of VACiS, as well as training programs on violence prevention.

4. Establish practical, usable databases on VACiS: invest in robust data collection systems, research, and evaluations to inform evidence-based policies and programs and track their impact.

5. Address social norms and practices: System-wide efforts should be endorsed at senior levels to shift mindsets and behaviors of adults and youth on violence.

6. Scale existing best practices in VACiS prevention: Successful evidence-based interventions that involve all actors within and beyond the school.

7. Increase accountability: Regional and national steering committees chaired by senior government representatives within the education sector should  including diverse members of civil society and the education system itself.

Deogratius Yiga of the Impact & Innovations Development Center (IIDC) then situated us all within an understanding of where we are regionally and globally in this journey to end violence in schools. Reflecting on the First Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children, Deo commended progress we have made as a field that has culminated in such a landmark event, despite the challenges that we continue to see. He called attention to emerging actions we are seeing at policy level and throughout civil society, each of them nascent efforts that have put the issue of VAC in schools on the global and regional agenda.

Recognizing the current global landscape and shifts in priorities, with many countries taking a ‘country first’ approach and where a survival mindset among governments and international organizations is challenging the gains we have made, Deogratius acknowledged the realignment of the field of international development within which so much of this work is situated. “With or without these shifts,” he asked us, “what do we need to do?” He left the Hub members with three recommendations:

First, we must “locate this agenda of VAC in schools within the education outcomes framework at country and regional level…a focus on positive educational outcomes will survive these [global] shifts – making a case that violence undermines these outcomes is a critical approach that we need to take, to link violence against children with the impacts of educational outcomes.”

Second, “continued investment in evidence generation will remain critical and has become even more critical now…we need to make the case that…prevention of violence against children in schools is possible, and that it is beneficial.”

Finally, we must “advocate for a demand-driven approach, where parents are advocating for this work. For far too long, we as civil society are leading this agenda…but there is an opportunity to center the role of parents to advocate for violence free schools…where education is being privatized…we need to see parents demanding violence free schools…I think schools will listen to parents more than they will listen to us.”

Members followed this call to action by adding that not only parents must be mobilized to advocate for violence free schools, but that we must consider how are we engaging children themselves in this advocacy. We were all reminded of the urgent need in this moment for shared leadership, not only among one another, but among all children, teachers and communities that violence against children impacts.

We must “advocate for a demand-driven approach, where parents are advocating for this work. For far too long, we as civil society are leading this agenda…but there is an opportunity to center the role of parents to advocate for violence free schools…where education is being privatized…we need to see parents demanding violence free schools…I think schools will listen to parents more than they will listen to us.”

Deogratius Yiga, Impact & Innovations Development Centre 

Closing word:

Our task is to continue to build and lead this field and ensure it not only survives this difficult global moment but transforms this world into a just world.

We thank every Africa Hub member for taking time out of their busy schedules to share with the community of practice in this space!