Studies conducted by Foro Dakar Honduras in 2020 shows that the main challenge in Honduras’ education system is the low investment of national budgets. This leads to an increasing part of investments falling on the families. This burden heavily affects the most excluded families who are forced to use part of their yearly budgets on sending their children to school, and in some cases have to choose between sending boys or girls, thus exacerbating gender inequalities. 
The main objective of the project led by Foro Dakar is to target these issues by mobilising civil society for a greater demand of increasing financial investments to the public education sector, gender sensitive budgets, and ultimately enable a transformative change in the public education of Honduras.

The project is building on a previous phase, implemented between April 2022 – December 2024. The interventions of this phase are divided in three parts:

1. The project will establish departmental chapters of Foro Dakar, to mobilise advocacy actions to increase the financing and implementation of gender-sensitive budgets in the public education sector through processes of oversight, demand, and allocation of spending.
2. Generate knowledge, data, and information on financial growth, expenditure execution, budget allocation, transparency, gender-sensitive budgeting and tax justice to strengthen monitoring and oversight of the public education sector.
3. Establish strategic alliances to position the need for financial growth and oversight in the public education sector.

Key activities will include:

• Setting up and strengthening the capacities of departmental chapters.
• Conducting research that prioritise gender and highlight the exclusion of girls in the education system and budgeting. 
• Designing local policies to monitor education sector spending. 
• Conduct shadow reports.
• Campaigns to promote measures and policies that tackle the exclusion of girls from science and technology careers due to gender stereotypes.
• Implement a media campaign to inform citizens about the Education Budget Increase Law.

The project builds on the logic that the implementation will contribute to an increase in public spending on the education system in Honduras, if: Foro Dakar’s base is expanded and strengthened in 3 departments; rigorous knowledge and data is produced and used for advocacy; and strategic synergy alliances are established to advocate for the expansion of the national budget and cooperation with a gender perspective and to monitor the execution of spending. With these interventions, the project will increase the possibilities of influencing authorities of the Ministry of Education and Finance and legislators to approve and execute an education budget consistent with the needs of the most marginalised groups.

A previous phase of the project was carried out between April 2022 – December 2023. The current project is part of the EOL extension phase of 2024-2026. Read more about the previous phase of the project here.