Our Moon Education is a UK registered charity (No 1165083) that unleashes the potential for high achieving, low income (HALI) young people in Zambia to contribute to positive social change, through education opportunities and personal guidance. 

In Zambia’s extremely unequal society, only the privileged few have the opportunity to complete secondary school and access higher education. For the brightest students from poor families, there exist few opportunities to thrive in education on merit. This traps those most acutely familiar with Zambia’s complex structural difficulties into a cycle of poverty and incapacity to influence social change.

Zambia has suffered from a lack of investment in universities for many decades with a deeply flawed student loan system which increasingly excludes the poorest students. Zambia’s national curriculum has no provision for 16-19 year olds. Students finishing the equivalent of GCSEs are forced to wait two years before they can gain a place at university, and then only if they are lucky enough to be admitted and receive a sufficient loan. Lack of access to the appropriate qualifications, skills and personal development also excludes these high-achieving low-income Zambians achieving entry requirements for scholarships abroad or from getting a job.

Our Moon carefully selects high-achieving but low-income students, in collaboration with local and national Zambia-based charities and schools, and provides them with a holistic education programme and guidance in applying for higher education scholarships.

Our students are extraordinary young people – they have excelled in their education despite the many challenges they have faced - but finish school abruptly with no obvious next step. Through our Young Leaders Programme,we provide these students with a one-year residential course combining academic studies, volunteering, a foreign language, critical reading, improving their written and oral communication skills (“Write to Speak”) as well as guiding their university applications. Keen to expand our reach, our Ambassadors of Social Change Programme offers a ten-week programme which focuses on the Write to Speak and volunteering modules of our Young Leaders Programme so that these young people can return to work on community based projects.