The UK pulled funding for a flagship £45 million girls’ education programme, launched just two years ago to support one million girls and women across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The decision is already raising serious questions about how committed Britain really is to the education of women and girls in the Global South.
The Strengthening Higher Education for Female Empowerment (SHEFE) programme was designed to widen access to quality higher education for girls and women, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. The outgoing Conservative government unveiled it, and its tender has now been withdrawn, according to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
What SHEFE was meant to do
At its core, SHEFE recognised a well-documented truth: when girls continue into higher education, they are far less likely to be married off as children, face lower rates of partner violence, and are more likely to earn higher incomes and reinvest in their communities.
For African women in particular, that connection between education and empowerment is tangible.
From Lagos to rural South Sudan, higher education has consistently opened doors that would otherwise stay shut—for entrepreneurs, policymakers, health workers, and community leaders. Programmes like SHEFE were meant to scale that impact by making higher education accessible to girls who would otherwise be locked out.
A cut that contradicts the message.
What makes the funding withdrawal sting is the timing and the messaging around it.
In May, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said women and girls remained a priority for the FCDO and stressed her determination to work across borders to protect women’s safety worldwide. Only weeks later, one of the UK’s most visible higher education investments for girls was quietly shelved.
Bambos Charalambous, Labour MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on global education, has said he is deeply troubled by the decision. He is not alone. Practitioners and advocates across international development and education argue that cutting SHEFE is the latest signal that the UK’s stated commitment to women and girls does not match its actions.
SHEFE is also part of a wider pattern. Charalambous previously highlighted a UK-backed programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo that had helped tens of thousands of girls into school for the first time before being wound down. Education funding has also been reduced in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, while the FCDO’s own Girls’ Education Department reportedly lost more than half its budget.
Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, co-founder of the International Parliamentary Network for Education, summed up the contradiction clearly: the government talks about supporting women and girls but continues to deny the world’s most marginalised girls the one intervention everyone agrees changes their lives most—access to education, including higher education.
Why does this land differently in Africa
For many African communities, an educated woman rarely benefits alone. She becomes a reference point:
- For younger girls watching what is possible,
- For the businesses she goes on to start,
- For the households, her income stabilises and protects.
This ripple effect is precisely what programmes like SHEFE were designed to accelerate. When funding disappears mid-stream, that momentum stalls. Girls who might have been the first in their families to attend university lose a path that had just begun to open.
The UK has defended the broader aid rollback as a matter of budget priorities. An FCDO spokesperson said cuts were driven by the need to fund an increase in defence spending, describing national security as the government’s first duty. They also stressed that funding to address violence against women and girls remains protected this year.
But for the girls and women who were meant to benefit from SHEFE, the practical effect is straightforward: an opportunity that was promised is no longer there. Global defence budgets may rise; local dreams of higher education quietly shrink.
Building beyond the aid cycle
None of this is new to African women who have long built without a safety net. Across the continent, grassroots scholarship schemes, women-led edtech platforms, faith-based initiatives, and community mentorship networks have stepped into the gap, creating access to learning that does not depend on whether a foreign government changes its budget line.
SHEFE’s cancellation is a reminder rather than a revelation: the most durable investment in African women’s futures is the one designed, funded, and controlled closer to home.
As foreign aid cycles tighten, the work of building local, resilient education pathways—owned by African institutions, movements, and women themselves—becomes even more critical.
At TWN, we will keep telling the stories of the women and organisations doing exactly that: shaping education access and opportunity in ways that cannot be switched off by a distant budget decision, and proving that when African women learn, entire communities move forward. Source Guardian news.
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