This case study profiles Ação Educativa, a Brazilian human rights organisation that trains educators and empowers young people to challenge harmful gender norms through the country's education system.
Ação Educativa is a human rights organisation based in São Paulo, Brazil, working to defend educational, cultural and youth rights and to strengthen democracy through education. Founded in 1994 by a former team from the Ecumenical Center for Documentation and Information, the organisation continues a long tradition of popular education rooted in the legacy of educationalist Paulo Freire.
Gender is central to Ação Educativa's work. Its Gender and Education project builds teachers' capacity around gender equality and censorship, while other initiatives such as the Mude com Elas, Tô no Rumo and Street Football help adolescents, including girls, LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous and quilombola youth, build leadership skills and challenge rigid gender expectations.
Ação Educativa treats gender as a social force that distributes power unequally, so its work spans multiple levels: training teachers, helping schools assess their own gender climate through tools like the Gender, Sexuality and Race in Schools indicators, and advocating for national policy change through the Coalition against Ultraconservatism in Education.
Since 1994, the organisation has trained 38,000 educators and reached around 105,000 young people. It pairs this work with research, including a national survey on ultraconservative narratives in education, to build evidence for what shifts gender norms.
Key messages
- Ação Educativa is a Brazilian human rights organisation that has worked since 1994 to defend educational, cultural and youth rights and to promote democracy through popular education.
- Its gender-focused programming works at multiple levels at once: training teachers, engaging adolescents directly, and advocating for national policy change.
- The organisation prioritises adolescents facing multiple forms of marginalisation, including girls, LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous and quilombola youth.
- Participatory tools such as the Gender, Sexuality and Race in Schools indicators help schools assess and address their own gender inequities.
- Ação Educativa coordinates the Coalition against Ultraconservatism in Education, a network of civil society groups, researchers and educators defending inclusive education against censorship and rollback efforts.
- The organisation combines programming with academic research to build an evidence base, while acknowledging it still needs stronger tools to measure the impact of its work on gender norms.
- Since 1994, Ação Educativa has trained 38,000 educators and reached around 105,000 young people.
