The power of local and community-led agendas to sustainably transform education systems in Africa

In rural Ntchisi, Malawi, community-led educational change is taking root. When faced with rising student dropout rates and poverty, a group of mothers at Kanjiwa Community Day Secondary School didn’t wait for external solutions. Instead, they ideated, designed, and implemented their own innovative response. Starting with just 50,000 Malawian kwachas ($28) in seed funding, these mothers leveraged their agricultural expertise and deep understanding of the local economy to launch a sustainable education financing model. Through strategic maize production and well-timed sales, they generated 480,000 kwachas ($274) in their first season. The profit was then reinvested in additional farming and continued funding of educational activities, providing economic opportunities and servicing orphans and marginalized learners in the community. The group has projected a fourfold increase in revenue to 1 million kwachas in the upcoming year.

Such initiative from Ntchisi has not only provided meals and school fees for vulnerable learners in resource-constrained communities in Malawi but also demonstrated how the agency of local actors, along with their knowledge and expertise, is critically relevant in creating sustainable education transformation. The mothers’ success, however, stands in stark contrast to broader trends in global development. While calls for localization and locally led development are slowly shifting Global North and donor-driven priorities towards embracing locally defined agendas in the past few decades, commitment to local ownership often masks persistent power imbalances. In practice, local organizations in the Global South often need to conform to Western metrics of capacity and operate within rigid frameworks that can reinforce rather than transform traditional hierarchies. As such, prior discussions on education systems transformation have called for a more critical analysis of the notion of power to support the creation of inclusive spaces for bottom-up leadership of local actors.

As we reflect upon decades of efforts promoting practices that put local actors in the lead and strengthen decentralized structures responsive to local needs, we explore examples from Dignitas Project (Dignitas) in Kenya, Creative Center for Community Mobilization (CRECCOM) in Malawi, and Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) in Ghana—three members of the Network for Education Systems Transformation (NEST)—to identify ways in which local actors in the Global South are already reimagining education systems through their own lens.

Institutional innovation in Kenya: Dignitas’ framework toward local agency

Kenya has made significant strides in promoting localization and locally led practices. The 2010 Constitution of Kenya emphasizes public engagement and participation in development processes, outlining mechanisms for public participation including the government’s responsibility to share information and consult the public regularly. Further, the decentralization of the government in 2013 aimed at devolving power, resources, and representation to the local level to promote a more bottom-up approach.

Realizing that full participation by the community—particularly in governance—remains a challenge despite the existence of supporting legal frameworks, Dignitas was established to foster community-driven engagement that continues to shape its operations in the communities served. Through Dignitas’ community engagement initiative, Valuing our Insights, Collaborations, and Evidence (VoICE), the organization seeks to ensure shared program ownership by integrating regular feedback and accountability mechanisms at school, zonal, subnational, and national levels. This participatory approach aims to ensure community voices are central to program design, implementation, and sustainability. During VoICE meetings, program and research teams collaborate with education actors to review shared data, enabling inclusive, data-informed goal setting and decisionmaking. Additionally, Dignitas has convened a local technical working group to support the research activities of the organization. This group leverages the knowledge and expertise of those most familiar with the context of Kenya, seeking to make certain that research activities and program implementations are culturally appropriate, contextually relevant, and aligned with local educational needs and priorities. Through these efforts, the Dignitas model strives to promote a locally driven agenda that integrates community perspectives into decisionmaking to enhance the relevance and sustainability of their interventions.

Youth-led solutions in Malawi: CRECCOM and community mobilization

Similarly, CRECCOM in Malawi has centered local voices and agenda-setting by leaning into their organizational strength of community mobilization, engaging young people, parents, and community members closest to youth deeply to explore community perspectives on the relevance of the Malawian education system. Through collaborating with youth forums established in 36 resource-constrained Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs), CRECCOM has identified that while young people expressed some level of satisfaction in acquiring entrepreneurship, critical thinking, problem-solving, public speaking, digital, and socioemotional skills in schools, the current education system fails to equip them with technical and vocational skills, including carpentry, welding, and tailoring that youth themselves have expressed strong interest in.

Recognizing the inherent agency of youth, CRECCOM implements life skills programs across CDSSs to create spaces that encourage young people to identify pressing challenges they face within their schools and communities and come up with solutions to address them. For example, battling the challenge of a lack of desks at Kameme CDSS, the youth forum members suggested they build desks as part of the carpentry and welding programs at the community skills development center. As the instructors for carpentry and welding at the center encouraged youth to identify supportive allies and ways to bring in raw materials, these young people capitalized on their networking, innovation, and negotiation skills to convince the head teacher of Kameme CDSS to share wood and steel from broken desks. As youth made use of these materials to build new desks, they strengthened their sense of belonging in their communities and enhanced their technical skills in welding and carpentry while also providing solutions to school challenges. Through this partnership with the skills development center, 50 beds and 80 desks from Kameme CDSS were mended for free by the youth at the center.

Communities of excellence in Ghana: GNECC and local change leaders

With the goals of enhancing the resources available at the school and community levels, increasing community and parental engagement in students’ learning, and ensuring teachers are delivering the curriculum as intended, GNECC has been supporting the Communities of Excellence Program (CEP), a Ministry of Education initiative supported by civil society organizations in Ghana, since 2022.

Through CEP, organizations such as Transforming Teaching, Education and Learning (T-TEL) and GNECC have supported the identification and training of 45 community change leaders in the Akuapem South, Bosome Freho, and Lambussie Districts of Ghana. These change leaders bring together diverse stakeholders and aim to strengthen community and parental engagement in local schools while enhancing the relationships between schools, parents, learners, and their communities. For example, through working with students themselves, these change leaders organized community drama performances to educate parents and community leaders on the need for parental support and engagement in their children’s education. These community events open up avenues to help sensitize communities, engage audiences in dynamic conversations, and offer the opportunity for meaningful relationship building.

Takeaways

As we continue to unpack the nuances and explore the tensions of development buzzwords such as “localization,” several critical considerations emerge for global and local actors to facilitate more equitable processes for system transformation:

1. “Local communities” are not monoliths and notions such as “local,” “global,” “localization,” and “locally led” vary significantly across contexts. Policymakers and researchers should aim to cultivate deep understandings of the contextual realities on the ground, meaningfully centering the knowledge and experiences of those leading and affected by systems change. They should identify the strengths and opportunities of existing systems in order to reimagine a more inclusive pathway forward.
2. The localization agenda is often choked by sentiments of “inadequate capacity” of local actors to religiously follow rigid, predefined procedures in designing, implementing, and evaluating projects or development initiatives. To advance truly locally led transformation, donors need to actualize more fair and accessible funding mechanisms that shift power to local actors and organizations. This means moving beyond the prevailing development approach where resources trickle down to communities and instead investing directly in strengthening local capacity and enabling participatory processes. While this may require greater investments of time and resources, communities must define their own priorities, activities, and measures of success. Funding mechanisms should be structured to accommodate the iterative nature of these processes, supporting genuine community ownership and sustainable system change.