Stability and Resilience | JWL Annual Report 2025
In 2025, while many organisations cut back or ceased activities in the face of global turmoil, Jesuit Worlwide Learning (JWL) remained steadfast and ensured over 13,000 students across 40 countries could continue to learn.
Students’ resilience has been especially remarkable. Although facing significant and mounting challenges in their daily lives, they remained utterly determined to pursue their studies, and, in many instances, took the lead at the local level to make sure educational activities could continue at their community learning centres.
Women in excluded communities face additional layers of discrimination and barriers, including at times being systematically denied access to education. In 2025, 57% of JWL’s global community of learners were young women, many of them leading by example and actively supporting other women and girls – and indeed all members of their community – to break these barriers and work towards a more just and peaceful tomorrow.
As the organisation looks towards the future, it will be guided by its 2026-2030 Strategic Framework. “To form critical universal and ecological citizens is the central strategy of our new strategic framework”, said JWL’s Executive President, Fr Peter Balleis, SJ.
While JWL is a work of the Central European Jesuit Province (ECE), its reach and collaborations span the globe. Over the next five years, it will strengthen its governance, continue to establish and expand collaborations to extend the reach of its higher education offer to excluded communities across the globe – with a specific focus on Africa (responding to the invitation of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar), and South America (building on the collaboration with the Amazon University Program, PUAM, linked to the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon).
Fr Balleis highlighted that it’s not just about higher education for the marginalised. “It’s about content. It’s about human dignity. It’s about peace in a war-torn world. It’s about the formation of integral thinking... of socio-ecological transformation... and that’s where our programmes will ever more focus on that because the vision is: learning together as a global community, acting for peace and human dignity.”
Jesuit Worlwide Learning
Higher Education at the Margins
For more information, download the PDF file of the Annual Report 2025 [8.2 MB]
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