Together for learning

Making quality education a priority

Quality education lays a foundation and opens doors to future opportunities for girls and boys. In crisis-affected and fragile communities around the world, like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), when education is prioritized, a child’s future can be changed.

World Vision has had a presence in DRC for over 40 years, with local staff working alongside communities suffering years of violence and displacement. Tudisange Bua Kalasa Kasai is a World Vision-led education project in Kasai Central province, a currently stable area recovering from a period of conflict that ran from 2016 to 2019. The three-year project, funded by the European Union, is currently in its second year (as of 2025) with the main goal of improving education access and performance of students living in crisis-affected and fragile places, especially girls.

While lack of access to quality learning is a major problem, the growing demographic of young people in Kasai faces additional challenges, including lack of essential resources such as water and electricity, dilapidated road infrastructure, food insecurity, household poverty, violence and psychosocial trauma.

To address these multiple crises, the Tudisange project is building gender-segregated and accessible latrines, supporting improved teaching quality and school governance practices, and providing social and economic opportunities for adolescents. The project is launching a number of activities in order to meet the needs of students in the community. These activities include catch-up and alternative education programs to get out-of-school children back into learning, conducting back-to-school awareness campaigns, distributing school learning kits, and setting up Youth Ready clubs where adolescents learn about their basic rights, healthy behaviour, peer relationships, and personal time and financial management.

No child should stay at home while others are learning

The back-to-school campaign is a month-long activity within the Tudisange project which officially launched in September 2025. This activity is supported by World Vision as well as the DRC Ministry of Education and New Citizenship, the government ministry responsible for the DRC’s education system. The campaign aims to mobilize parents, community leaders and local authorities to guarantee an inclusive and equitable return to school, especially for vulnerable children. Families, communities, education authorities, and World Vision’s local partners have joined forces to ensure no child in Kasaï Central is left behind.

Justin Kandala, project manager of Tudisange says, “We want every parent to understand that education is a right, not an option.”

Training teachers to better support students

Reading with comprehension is an essential skill; however, the team discovered that only nine per cent of children completing Grade 3 in Tudisange’s target schools had the ability to read with comprehension. To address this alarming finding, the project introduced Unlock Literacy, a reading comprehension approach for training teachers in evidence-based approaches to literacy.

As Jean-Pierre Kibawa, education specialist for World Vision DRC emphasizes, “No child can progress in their studies if they cannot read with comprehension. That is why we must intervene from the earliest years.”

The success of the teacher training relies on local education authorities to be part of the solution.

“This training has enabled me to understand how to structure an effective reading session," says Thérèse Kabamba, a school inspector. "I am ready to support teachers in this process.”

Moving into the final year

As the Tudisange project moves into its third year of implementation, World Vision looks forward to seeing more girls, boys and adolescents in Kasai Central returning to school, realizing positive gains in school performance, and looking forward to their futures with confidence.