Case study: Centre for Girls' Education

This case study profiles the Centre for Girls' Education (CGE), a Nigerian organisation that combines safe spaces, mentorship and religious community engagement to keep girls in school and delay early marriage.

CGE began in 2007 as a research partnership between the Bixby Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital in Kaduna State, Nigeria. It became an independent, women-led organisation in 2016. CGE works to expand girls' access to education and delay child marriage across Northern Nigeria, a region where early marriage and low female literacy remain widespread.

At the heart of its model are Safe Spaces: weekly, mentor-led sessions where girls build literacy, numeracy and life skills alongside confidence and leadership. Mentors, known as Malama, are often local women who model new possibilities, including CGE graduates who have become teachers, engineers and doctors. Programmes are tailored to different groups, including Pathways to Choice for out-of-school girls and Married Adolescent Safe Spaces for married girls aged 14 to 19.

CGE deliberately works within cultural and religious norms rather than against them, engaging traditional rulers and religious scholars to reinterpret Qur'anic teachings in ways that affirm girls' right to education. It has recently piloted Boys' Safe Spaces to build allyship and involve boys in challenging harmful stereotypes. CGE also partners with the Kaduna State government through the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, helping institutionalise life skills within government school curricula.

Rigorous evaluations, including two randomised controlled trials, found that girls in CGE's safe spaces were 40 percent more likely to stay in school and twice as likely to delay marriage compared to girls in similar communities without the programme.

Key messages

• CGE's Safe Space model provides girls with mentor-led sessions combining literacy, numeracy, life skills and reproductive health education.
• The organisation works within local cultural and religious norms rather than against them, engaging traditional rulers and religious scholars to help communities see girls' education as compatible with their faith.
• Randomised controlled trials found that girls in CGE's safe spaces were 40 percent more likely to stay in school and twice as likely to delay marriage compared to girls in similar communities without the programme.
  CGE has piloted Boys' Safe Spaces to engage adolescent boys as allies in challenging harmful gender stereotypes.
• The organisation partners with Nigerian state governments, including through the World Bank-backed Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, to embed life skills and gender-responsive teaching into formal school curricula.
• CGE has trained over 750 mentors and reaches around 50,000 girls a year, having served over 300,000 girls cumulatively across eight states in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic.
• Its model has been adapted by partners in five other countries, including Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.