Spring Bud Project: Nationwide Scholarships for Rural Girls' Education

Launched in 1989 by the China Children and Teenagers' Fund under the All-China Women's Federation, the Spring Bud Project funds schooling, mentoring, vocational and STEM training and psychosocial support to return dropout girls from poor rural families to school and improve conditions at girls-serving schools in China's poorest counties.

By end-2023 the project had raised over 3.2 billion yuan (~US$451 million) and supported 4.22 million girls across all 31 provincial-level regions and 56 ethnic groups; over 527,000 girls received vocational skills training and 190,000 received one-to-one mental-health support. In 2023 it was named a joint laureate of the UNESCO Prize for Girls' and Women's Education.

The source frames the project's 34+ years of continuity, large independently corroborated reach, and continuous adaptation to emerging needs as making it a strong reference model for large-scale, foundation-run girls'-education financing in a developing-country context, while cautioning that no counterfactual evaluation isolates its causal effect.