This case study profiles Raising Voices, a Ugandan feminist organisation whose Good School Toolkit has become a global model for preventing violence and shifting gender norms in schools.
Raising Voices was founded in 1999 in Kampala, Uganda, by Lori Michau and Dipak Naker, following early work with women and children in Tanzania that revealed the limits of responding to violence only after it occurred. In 2004, the organisation expanded its mandate to include violence against children, which led to the creation of the Good School Toolkit in 2008.
The Toolkit is a whole-school intervention that works through four domains: teacher-student relationships, peer relationships, student and teacher engagement with the school, and connections between school and community. It supports schools to replace corporal punishment with positive discipline and includes materials such as a cartoon booklet, 'Are you promoting gender fairness in your school?', which directly challenges stereotypes like 'girls belong in the kitchen' and 'leadership is for men.' Implementation is led by Good School Committees made up of students, teachers and community members, who act as champions of change within their own schools.
A randomised controlled trial, the Good School Study (2012–2014), found a significant reduction in the risk of physical violence from staff to students after 18 months of implementation, alongside improved student-teacher relationships and greater student voice.
Raising Voices works closely with Uganda's Ministry of Education and Sports, and in November 2024 the Ugandan government pledged to scale the Toolkit nationwide and outlaw corporal punishment in all settings by 2030.
Key messages
- Raising Voices' Good School Toolkit is a whole-school intervention that prevents VACiS including replacing corporal punishment with positive discipline, working across teacher-student, peer, and school-community relationships.
- A randomised controlled trial found a significant reduction in the risk of physical violence from staff to students after 18 months of implementation.
- Curricular materials, including a Gender Fairness Handbook, directly challenge stereotypes such as 'girls belong in the kitchen' and 'leadership is for men.'
- In November 2024, the Ugandan government pledged to scale the Toolkit nationwide and outlaw corporal punishment in all settings by 2030.
- The Good School Toolkit highlights the misuse of power as the root cause of all forms of violence against children.
- The Toolkit treats corporal punishment and gender-based violence as interconnected expressions of the same misuse of power, rather than as separate issues.
- Raising Voices deliberately builds local ownership, with Good School Committees of students, teachers and community members leading implementation rather than external facilitators.
