NGOs working on school dropout in later adolescence are filling gaps that states still leave open

NGOs working on school dropout in later adolescence are filling gaps that states still leave open | Photo: Fajar Herlambang

Later adolescent school dropout is often treated as a late stage failure, a point at which a young person has already drifted beyond the reach of the education system. Yet the global pattern suggests something more structural. Upper secondary education remains the point where cost, care burdens, unsafe travel, child marriage, conflict, migration and weak public financing converge most sharply. In 2021, only one in two young people of upper secondary age attended either upper secondary school or higher education, according to UNICEF, while UNESCO’s 2025 SDG 4 scorecard put the wider global out of school population of children and youth at 272 million in 2023.

Later adolescent school dropout is a systems problem, not a personal failure. In practical terms, the issue matters because leaving school at 15, 16 or 17 often narrows access to formal employment, vocational training, civic participation and health information at the very stage when social risk is rising. For girls, dropout can be bound up with care work, early pregnancy or pressure to marry. For boys, it may be tied to insecure labour, migration or disengagement from under-resourced schools. In both cases, the final years before completion are where public systems frequently become least flexible and most punitive.

That is where NGOs and civil society organisations have become unusually important. Not because they can replace ministries of education, but because they often work on the barriers that governments are slow to address, transport, menstrual health, school fees, psychosocial support, refugee inclusion, re-entry routes and community level mentoring. NGOs are often strongest where public systems are least flexible. The most serious organisations in this field do not simply campaign for enrolment, they work on retention, completion and second chance pathways.

In sub-Saharan Africa, CAMFED has built its work around a basic but often neglected reality: poor rural adolescent girls are most likely to leave school when indirect costs and social pressures intensify in secondary education. The organisation says its core focus is support for girls at secondary level, including school-going costs, uniforms, menstrual supplies, bicycles and boarding where distance makes attendance unsafe or unrealistic. It also reports that girls supported by the programme are three times less likely to drop out. Keeping girls in upper secondary school often depends on mundane costs, not grand policy slogans. That matters because dropout in later adolescence is frequently triggered not by one dramatic event, but by an accumulation of manageable obstacles that nobody manages.

A similar logic shapes the work of Pratham in India through its Second Chance programme, which supports young women and girls who have already dropped out to complete secondary education. That is an important distinction. Some civil society groups focus on prevention, others on re-entry, and the latter may become more important as countries confront the legacy of pandemic disruption, economic pressure and patchy transitions from lower to upper secondary school. Second chance education matters because many adolescents do not leave school only once. They leave, attempt to return, and are then blocked by bureaucracy, household economics or stigma.

For adolescents affected by displacement, conflict and legal exclusion, the barriers are even sharper. Jesuit Refugee Service, for example, works across refugee contexts and says it provides learning opportunities from primary and secondary school through to alternative learning and life skills. The point here is not only access to a classroom. In many host countries, refugee adolescents are shut out by language, documentation rules, underfunded public schools or the simple fact that humanitarian responses often prioritise younger children first. Refugee adolescents are among the easiest students for systems to overlook. That problem has become more urgent as Education Cannot Wait reported in its 2025 global estimates update that 234 million school-aged children in crises require urgent support to access quality education, an increase over recent years.

The crisis dimension is no longer marginal to the story. Climate shocks are also disrupting continuity in ways that raise the risk of dropout among older pupils, especially where missed schooling pushes families to conclude that returning is no longer worth the cost. UNICEF said in early 2025 that at least 242 million students in 85 countries or territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in 2024. For a 16 year old already balancing paid work, domestic labour or exam pressure, repeated interruption can become a final exit. Climate disruption is becoming an education retention issue.

Groups such as Save the Children and Plan International have long worked on the surrounding conditions that shape adolescent retention, especially in emergencies and for girls facing violence in and around school. Plan International’s reporting has drawn attention to school related gender-based violence as a barrier to girls completing education, while Save the Children has highlighted the way crisis settings and unequal local conditions cut off adolescents from continued learning. These are not side issues. A school place on paper does little for a young person who cannot travel safely, fears harassment, or is expected to generate income instead. Safety is an education policy issue, not an add-on.

The public-interest case for focusing on later adolescence is also economic and civic. Completion of secondary education is closely tied to labour market prospects, delayed marriage, better health outcomes and greater resilience to shocks. In SDG terms, the issue sits most directly within SDG 4 (quality education), but it also connects in substantive ways to SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth) and, in crisis settings, SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions). That connection matters because dropout is rarely just an education sector metric. It is often an early warning sign that wider protections are failing.

Still, the role of NGOs should not be romanticised. Many of the most effective interventions, cash support, transport, school meals, re-entry rules for young mothers, language support, flexible schedules, need state scale and public budgets. Civil society can demonstrate models, gather evidence, push accountability and reach excluded groups faster. It cannot by itself guarantee universal completion. NGOs can innovate, but only governments can normalise inclusion at scale. This is the central tension in the field. Much of the best work remains localised or donor dependent, even when the underlying problem is national.

The latest UNESCO benchmark push suggests governments are at least acknowledging the scale of the challenge, with countries committing to reduce the number of out of school children and youth by 165 million by 2030. But that target will remain distant unless upper secondary retention becomes a policy priority rather than an afterthought. Upper secondary retention is where education promises are most often broken. Later adolescent dropout is not only about whether a teenager is still in school this term. It is about whether public institutions can carry young people through the most fragile transition in their education, before poverty, displacement or discrimination turns temporary interruption into permanent exclusion.

For that reason, the most relevant NGOs are those that recognise dropout in later adolescence as a threshold problem. They work not only to get adolescents into school, but to keep them there, bring them back, or create credible alternatives when formal systems fail. The decisive question is no longer enrolment alone, but whether adolescents are able to stay, return and finish. In that narrower but more meaningful sense, the organisations working on school dropout in later adolescence are exposing the distance between global education commitments and the daily conditions that decide whether a young person completes school at all.

Further information:

·       CAMFED, a pan-African NGO focused on girls’ secondary education, relevant for its work on retention, material support and community mentoring. https://camfed.org/

·       Pratham, an Indian non-profit relevant for its Second Chance programme supporting girls and young women to complete secondary education after dropout. https://www.pratham.org/

·       Jesuit Refugee Service, an international organisation relevant for its education programmes for refugee and displaced adolescents, including secondary and alternative learning. https://jrs.net/

·       Plan International, a global development and rights organisation relevant for its work on girls’ education, gender-based violence and adolescent exclusion.

https://plan-international.org/

·       Save the Children, an international NGO relevant for its education and protection work in fragile, unequal and crisis-affected settings.https://www.savethechildren.net/