Different Contexts, Common Aspirations: 10 Ways Adolescents in Zambia are Helping Build Safer Schools
This year, International Youth Day is celebrating Different Contexts, Common Aspirations, honouring and highlighting global solidarity, shared challenges, and youth innovation. Young people around the world commonly desire quality education, decent work, and opportunities to build a better future1 and have made a clear and unified demand for meaningful, effective, safe and sustained participation throughout education decision-making2.
World Vision Zambia has been implementing the IMPACT+ approach in more than 300 schools to equip adolescents with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values needed to thrive while contributing to safer and more inclusive learning environments. IMPACT+ offers a practical example of what it looks like when an education programme treats adolescents not only as learners to be supported and protected, but as partners who can exercise agency and leadership in making their own schools safer and more enabling learning environments.
Implementation across schools has demonstrated that IMPACT+ extends beyond improving individual competencies. It has strengthened school culture, promoted positive relationships, enhanced student leadership, and contributed to improved learning outcomes by creating environments where adolescents feel safe, respected, included, and supported.
1. Building Safe and Peaceful School Environments through Peer Leadership
IMPACT+ has resulted in adolescents’ ability to peacefully resolve conflicts among themselves. Through structured life skills sessions focusing on communication, empathy, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and mediation, learners increasingly address disagreements without violence or teacher intervention.
Teachers in school implementing IMPACT+ have reported spending less instructional time resolving learner conflicts, enabling them to focus more on teaching and improving academic performance. Club members have become positive role models who influence other pupils to adopt respectful behaviour and peaceful conflict resolution.
Life skills combined with peer leadership create self-regulating school communities where learners become part of the solution in maintaining discipline and safety.
2. Preventing Bullying through Positive Peer Relationships
Bullying has reduced in many participating schools as learners develop empathy, respect, and conflict management skills. Club members actively discourage bullying and encourage kindness, dialogue, and mutual support. Instead of punitive approaches, IMPACT+ promotes restorative relationships where learners understand the consequences of harmful behaviour and are encouraged to repair relationships.
Peer-led prevention strategies are often more effective than adult-led disciplinary approaches because adolescents influence each other's behaviour more strongly than formal rules alone.
3. Strengthening Protective Factors through Life Skills Education
IMPACT+ equips adolescents with practical life skills that increase resilience against violence, abuse, exploitation, child marriage, adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, and other risks affecting young people.
The curriculum promotes decision-making and responsible choices, self-awareness and confidence, healthy relationships, communication and negotiation skills, and help-seeking behaviour. As learners gain confidence, they become more likely to report concerns, support vulnerable peers, and make positive life choices.
4. Promoting Positive Behaviour Change and Academic Success
Schools implementing IMPACT+ have observed noticeable improvements in learner behaviour. Club members consistently demonstrate punctuality, discipline, respect for school rules, improved study habits, teamwork, and responsibility.
These positive behaviours have had a positive effect on the wider student population, contributing to a more conducive learning environment. Teachers have associated these behavioural improvements with increased classroom participation, better concentration, reduced disciplinary cases, and improved examination performance in several participating schools.
Behavioural change is most sustainable when adolescents practice positive behaviours through experiential learning, peer influence, mentoring, and recognition rather than through punitive measures.
5. Creating Inclusive Schools Where Every Child Belongs
IMPACT+ intentionally promotes inclusion of children with disabilities and other marginalised learners through participatory games, storytelling, collaborative learning, acts of kindness, and peer support.
Club activities encourage learners to appreciate diversity, reject discrimination, and actively include all children regardless of disability, gender, or social background. This has contributed to improved social cohesion and reduced isolation of vulnerable learners.
Embedding inclusion within everyday school activities helps normalise acceptance and creates a culture where diversity is viewed as a strength rather than a barrier.
6. Improving School Hygiene and Health through Student-Led Action
The IMPACT+ service-learning approach has supported anti-litter campaigns that have significantly improved school cleanliness and hygiene. Learners organise regular clean-up activities, establish waste management systems, and promote handwashing and environmental responsibility.
Improved sanitation contributes to reducing common illnesses such as malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, and other waterborne infections, resulting in healthier learners and fewer school absences.
Service learning enables learners to translate knowledge into practical action while developing ownership of their school environment.
7. Supporting Menstrual Health and Reducing Absenteeism
Schools have implemented service-learning projects that produce reusable sanitary pads while strengthening menstrual health education.
The initiative has:
- Reduced absenteeism among adolescent girls.
- Increased girls' confidence to attend school during menstruation.
- Improved menstrual hygiene knowledge.
- Reduced stigma surrounding menstruation.
- Enhanced peer support for girls experiencing their first menstrual periods.
Older schoolgirls in higher grades mentor younger learners through peer-to-peer support, creating safe spaces where adolescents can freely seek guidance and encouragement in a child-friendly space.
Combining menstrual health education with practical solutions and peer support promotes girls' retention, dignity, and protection while reducing vulnerabilities associated with school absenteeism.
8. Developing Student Leadership and School Governance
IMPACT+ intentionally nurtures leadership among adolescents by building communication, responsibility, integrity, teamwork, and civic participation. Many club members have subsequently been elected or appointed as prefects, school council representatives, and leaders of various school committees.
These learners contribute positively to school governance by representing learner voices, supporting discipline, promoting accountability, and strengthening collaboration between learners and teachers.
9. Supporting School Feeding and Nutrition
School gardens established through service learning have strengthened school feeding initiatives by providing vegetables that improve the nutritional quality of school meals.
The gardens also serve as practical learning sites where learners develop agricultural skills, environmental stewardship, teamwork, and responsibility.
Improved nutrition contributes to better learner concentration, attendance, and overall wellbeing. Integrating nutrition, education, and life skills creates multiple benefits that improve both learning outcomes and child wellbeing.
10. Building Safe and Peaceful Schools through Adolescent-Led Art Project
One of the notable best practices emerging from the implementation of the IMPACT+ model in Zambia is the promotion of peace, positive values, and good morals within schools through adolescent-led service-learning projects. As part of their community service projects, IMPACT+ club members in some schools have designed and painted educational murals and artwork carrying messages on peace, non-violence, inclusion, respect, child rights, and positive behaviour. These visible reminders have contributed to transforming school environments into spaces that reinforce positive social norms and encourage respectful interactions among learners. Teachers and school administrators have reported that these student-led initiatives have contributed to reducing incidents of violence, bullying, and conflict within schools while fostering a stronger culture of safety, mutual respect, and inclusion.
By giving adolescents ownership of creating positive change in their learning environments, IMPACT+ has strengthened their leadership, educational responsibility, and commitment to building safe and enabling schools where every child can learn, participate, and thrive.
Conclusion
Creating and maintaining safe and enabling learning environments is a shared challenge across schools and spaces the world over. The experience of implementing IMPACT+ in Zambia demonstrates that adolescent leadership and innovation can significantly strengthen safe and enabling schools when life skills, child protection, positive youth development, safeguarding, and service-learning are delivered as an integrated package. By empowering adolescents to lead, support their peers, solve problems, and contribute to school improvement, the model creates lasting changes that benefit learners, teachers, and the wider school community.
The evidence emerging from participating schools shows investing in adolescents in this integrated way can connect learning, participation, wellbeing, inclusion, and protection. Adolescent life skills are as foundational to their wellbeing and learning as academic achievements in literacy and numeracy. Achieving the aspiration that every adolescent can learn, participate, and thrive requires listening to young people, strengthening their assets and agency, and giving them meaningful opportunities to shape the environments in which they learn.