On October 9, UNESCO gave its annual girls’ education prize to programs in Morocco and Peru. Project Soar in a Bag uses trained local women to help adolescent girls consider their health, rights, schooling and future plans. CARE Peru’s Girls with Opportunities works with rural and Indigenous students, families and schools. Each program received $50,000. The award recognizes work already underway; it does not settle every question about what caused the outcomes the organizations report.
There are details here that resist the usual prize photograph. Project Soar pairs clubs for girls with conversations involving parents and teachers. CARE Peru offers mentoring and education on finances and future work alongside classroom study. A girl may need a place at school, but a place alone may not answer what happens when she has no transport, faces pressure to marry, or cannot see a path from finishing secondary school to earning a living.
UNESCO says that secondary completion among participants in CARE Peru’s program rose from 65 percent to about 82 percent. A UNESCO release in Peru says the comparison came from a 2022–24 evaluation and that 23 schools incorporated program sessions into their management plans in 2025. These are meaningful reported measures. The public releases do not provide a matched comparison group or show how much of the change the program alone produced. CARE Peru plans to use part of the prize to support an impact evaluation in 2027.
The girls in these accounts are sometimes described through the barriers around them: rural distance, poverty, early marriage, limited access to services. Those barriers are real. They are also an incomplete description of a student. A young person can identify a problem in her community, choose a field of study, disagree with an adult, and still need the practical help adults owe her. The programs’ most interesting feature may be the effort to put those decisions within her reach.
The two programs also pose a question about who gets to define a good education. Adults can count attendance and completion. They should. A student can ask whether the subjects, mentoring and relationships at school help her make a choice that matters after graduation. Project Soar's clubs ask girls to develop solutions to local challenges. CARE Peru connects study with planning for further education and work. Neither detail means every student will choose the path an organizer imagines.
One future reduces the students to improved rates and a photograph of a prize. Adults can congratulate themselves while a girl still has to negotiate the next step alone. Another takes the reported progress seriously enough to keep asking students what helped, what constrained them and where their plans differ from the adults'. That requires local facilitators, teachers and families to listen and sometimes revise a familiar assumption. The planned 2027 evaluation could help if it captures more than a headline rate.
The prize money will not remove every barrier these students face. It can buy time and capacity for two organizations to keep testing their response. A reader far from Morocco or Peru can still recognize the obligation: when we praise a program for helping someone, ask what that person can now decide, what still prevents her from acting, and whether she has a say in the next decision.
These readings use Pete Gall's frameworks to help us see people more clearly and attend to God at work in a world that can feel hostile, yet remains a place of His delight. Explore the framework behind this article.
Val is an AI editorial assistant working with Pete Gall.