“PEAS’ work is aligned with the priorities of the government. We commend you, as your contribution is going a long way in transforming the nation.” – Dr Kelvin Mambwe, Permanent Secretary for Education Services
This statement refers to a school network that has doubled in five years and now teaches over 7,000 Zambian children, many of whom would not otherwise be in secondary school.
Last week, PEAS, the Ministry of Education and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) gathered in Lusaka to celebrate the close of the Empowerment and Development for Girls’ Education programme, or EDGE. When it launched in 2021, the goal was to get more of Zambia’s most excluded children, especially girls, into secondary school, to improve the quality of what they learn there, and to strengthen the system around them.
Five years on, the showcase was a chance to ask: did we do it?
What EDGE set out to do
EDGE was built on a simple premise, one Dr Kelvin Mambwe put well in his keynote: that government, FCDO and PEAS working together could achieve more for Zambia’s students than any one partner could alone.
The programme was organised around three aims:
- Widen access to secondary school for disadvantaged children, particularly girls;
- Raise the quality of teaching and learning in those schools; and
- Strengthen the government system around them, so better practice reaches far more children than PEAS could ever teach directly.
Widening access
With FCDO funding, PEAS built four new secondary schools, in Chinsali, Ndola, Chirundu and Sinda, and expanded existing ones, doubling the size of the PEAS Zambia school network. It now reaches over 7,000 students, 56% of them girls, in communities where finishing primary school, let alone starting secondary, has never been guaranteed.
The point was never buildings for their own sake. It was to create safe places to learn, boarding that helps girls from remote villages stay in school, and a route into secondary education for young people who would otherwise have stopped.
Raising quality
A new school is only as good as the lessons taught inside it. So, EDGE invested in what a student actually feels day to day: whether the head teacher knows what is happening in every classroom, whether the school is safe, and whether today’s lesson is any good. Head teachers were trained and then coached in their own schools. Teachers use PEAS Top 10 Teaching Practices, classroom methods based on global and local evidence of what works in the classroom and simple enough to observe, coach and repeat. And safeguarding was strengthened, so that a child with something difficult to report knows who to tell and knows they will be listened to.
Dr Mambwe was clear about why this matters. Education quality does not improve through one intervention. It improves when school leadership, safety, teaching and learning, accountability and community engagement pull in the same direction. A programme that fixes one part and leaves the rest alone runs for a while, then fades.
Strengthening the system
This is the part we are proudest of, and the part that travelled furthest beyond our own school gates.
Much of the work happened through the Targeted Improvement for Equitable Education in Zambia (TIEEZ), a school improvement programme, co-designed and delivered with the Ministry of Education, and one of the innovations HundrED named to its Global Collection 2026 – its annual pick of the education work with the strongest evidence behind it and the best chance of scaling. Provincial and district officials plan the work, monitor it and coach in schools alongside PEAS teams. It began as support for 20 primary schools in Northern Province. It now reaches over 70,000 students across 170 government primary and secondary schools in three provinces. That is roughly ten times the number of young people in PEAS’ own Zambian schools. It has also helped grow practical teacher preparation from two colleges of education to five.
The clearest sign it is taking root came from government itself. An Assistant Director from the Ministry’s teacher education directorate described how his colleagues came to adopt the Top 10 Teaching Practices.
“After seeing what PEAS was doing with the Secondary Directorate around the Top 10 teaching practices, as a directorate in charge of training teachers we approached them to have the programme introduced in our colleges of education,” he said.
There are now two handbooks: one for trainee teachers in the colleges, one for teachers already working in classrooms. Both have been signed off for national use by the Ministry’s curriculum development directorate which puts the Top 10 into the national teacher training pathway, so that in time, every teacher entering a Zambian government school will have been trained in methods developed and tested in PEAS schools. Usually, it is the NGO knocking on the ministry’s door, but here it was the other way round.
The most telling reflection came from a Director of Standards: “At first I was sceptical about the PEAS programme, but after understanding it better, I am now flowing with it.” On girls’ education, Dr Mambwe put the case in terms of whole communities: “Women and girl children are the most vulnerable. When you educate a girl you educate a boy as well.”
What comes next
EDGE was designed to strengthen education systems over the long term, even beyond the lifetime of the programme.
PEAS will keep supporting government schools and working with the Ministry on its priorities, building on the foundations EDGE laid. Some of what the programme started is already self-sustaining: a teaching framework the national directorate has adopted no longer depends on PEAS to keep it alive. Other parts are earlier in that journey. One challenge in the final year was the introduction of a new national curriculum. The direction of that reform is a positive one, and one PEAS supports, but teaching practice cannot change overnight. As teachers worked to rebuild their lessons around a new syllabus, teaching quality in government partner schools dipped slightly. PEAS and Ministry coaches are continuing to work with school leaders and teachers to embed the Top 10 within the new curriculum, so the two reinforce each other, rather than compete for a teacher’s attention.
Sustainable change happens when governments lead. Governments brings scale, ownership and reach. PEAS brings implementation experience and evidence from running our own schools. EDGE showcases how the two fit together: test and refine an approach to understand what works, adapt with government to ensure it is aligned to their priorities and will work within the everyday constraints, and only then scale across the education system. You will not find the real measure of that in a closing ceremony or a final report. It is a student in a government classroom in Northern Province, taught by someone trained in methods that began in a PEAS school. She will never know PEAS was involved and she does not need to.
PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools) supports young people in Sub-Saharan Africa to access quality education and brighter futures by building high-quality schools, developing innovations that improve school leadership, safety, teaching and learning, and working with governments to scale them. In Zambia, the EDGE programme was delivered with funding from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office between 2021 and 2026.