Life is incredibly challenging for girls in Mozambique. The country has the ninth highest rate of child marriage in the world – half of all girls are married before they’re 18, and half are pregnant or already mothers before their 19th birthday. More than half the girls who do enroll in school drop out before grade 5, and half of Mozambican women are illiterate.

Through our Gender-Responsive Education and Transformation (GREAT) program, we’ve been working with local partners in Mozambique’s Maputo and Gaza provinces — two of the most impoverished areas in the country — to advance girls’ fundamental rights to a quality education.

Thanks to a new $1 million from the Slaight Family Foundation’s visionary Global Initiative for Women and Girls announced yesterday, we’ll be able to transform the lives of more than 50,000 girls across Mozambique by removing barriers to accessing education, building teacher capacity, and positively impacting national programs and policies. The result will be higher literacy rates, lower drop-out rates, and a generation of girls who are better supported to succeed.

"Access to education is the key to unlocking a girl’s ability to overcome adversity, protect herself from harm and empower her to claim her rights,” said Kevin Frey, CEO of Right To Play. “We’re proud to be one of the small number of leading organizations whose work is being recognized and funded through the Slaight Family Foundation’s visionary Global Initiative for Women and Girls. This support will allow us to create lasting benefits for girls by removing barriers to accessing education, and by addressing the factors that influence a girl’s success: her family, her community, her school and teachers, and the national programs and policies that drive how education is shaped and taught.”

“The aim of this gift is to improve conditions for women and girls living in difficult circumstances, who represent some of the world’s most vulnerable populations,” said Gary Slaight of The Slaight Family Foundation. “The projects we are funding will leverage the expertise of these vital organizations to protect women and girls in the most fragile countries from direct harm, rebuild the lives of those who have been unjustly affected by conflict, deprivation and disease and give them the tools and support they need to survive and thrive.”

• 52,500 girls
• 138 schools
• 1,284 teachers
• 367,500 community members

Half of the 2.3 million children we reach every year are girls. Around the world in our programs, girls learn to resist child marriage, to say no to unwanted sex and to take care of their bodies. Boys learn to respect that girls are their equals and build positive ideas about masculinity and gender equality. Our work shows parents the damage that early marriage and pregnancy, female genital mutilation, neglect and gender-based discrimination inflict on their daughters. And we engage community leaders and parents in standing up for girls and equality, so that they become protected, educated and empowered.

In 2018, Right To Play launched the Gender Responsive Education and Transformation (GREAT) program with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through Global Affairs Canada. Active in three countries, Ghana, Mozambique and Rwanda, GREAT uses Right To Play's play-based learning approach to remove barriers to education, especially for girls, and to build teacher capacity to improve learning outcomes.