Partnership is at the core of the Education Plus initiative

The United Nations co-lead agencies—UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women—seek to mobilize and engage multiple partners with the shared mission of empowering adolescent girls and young women and advancing gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa.

These partners include influential high-profile institutions and individuals, global and regional financing institutions, civil society networks, feminist, women’s and youth organizations, including adolescent girls and young women living with HIV, parents’ and teachers’ associations, faith-based and traditional leaders with progressive platforms on gender equality and adolescent girls’ rights and grass-roots networks. The initiative also brings business, unions and the media to join forces with adolescent girls and young women to generate an unstoppable momentum for transformation.

Education Plus partners play a key role in supporting and driving advocacy mobilization for impact and incidence on decision-makers and budget-holders; as well as to foster sustainability of the advocacy beyond the initiative.

The initiative’s open advocacy platform aims to facilitate large-scale mobilization and coalition-building across diverse partners, coalescing around the same ‘ask’ for scale up of the multi-sectoral ‘Education Plus’ package and its rights-based, gender-responsive approach.

An inaugural partners coordination meeting held on June 03, 2022 brought together approximately 200 participants from diverse organizations to explore potential areas of collaboration and have discourse on the type of partner advocacy platform to be created.