Our History

How we started

Restless Development was founded in 1985 by Jim Cogan, then Deputy Head of Westminster School.

We called ourselves Schools Partnership Worldwide, and our work focused on sending gap year students from British schools to teach core academic subjects like mathematics, English and science in underserved schools in Zimbabwe and India.

By 1992, more than 100 young people from all around the UK were volunteering with us. Our programmes had expanded to Nepal (1991) and Tanzania (1992) as well, and we changed our name to Students Partnership Worldwide.

Evolving over the years

Jumping through a number of years, from 1992 to 2005, we changed a lot. We started running programmes in a number of new countries, adding Uganda (1997), South Africa (1998), Australia and the USA (2002).

The face of our organisation started to change. We started recruiting and placing national volunteers, more and more as the years went by.

We changed the nature of what we did, working less on formal academic subjects, and focusing more on the development issues affecting young people: HIV and AIDS, education, nutrition, hygiene and sanitation, etc. 

We also earned a reputation for high quality programmes, and being able to reach into remote rural areas where others could not. New countries started inviting us to open up programmes, like in Zambia (where in 2004 the Ministry of Education asked us to help them address HIV/AIDS in schools) and Sierra Leone (where in 2005 the Ministry of Youth and Sports asked us to help address sexual health and youth exclusion in the post-conflict context). 

Present day

We have continued our commitment to delivering high quality programmes in underserved communities. More than 1,000 Volunteer Peer Educators work with us each year, 90+% of whom are working in their own country. These young leaders in turn reach more than 420,000 youth as part of our sexual reproductive health, life skills and livelihoods, and leadership programmes.

And we have found many new ways to use our youth expertise, training other youth-led organisations in more than 30 countries around the world, providing technical support to major aid agencies like the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development, and so much more. 

We have grown consistently, now led by more than 200 full-time staff (average age 25, 60% former volunteers), and have won national and international awards for the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of our youth-led development approach.

After three years of collective work by young professionals and young people across the world, in 2010 we launched a new name and brand to capture our youth-led mission and ambitions. We are proud to be Restless Development, the youth-development agency.

Read all about our work in recent years in our annual reports from 2006 to 2009.

If you are one of the more than 15,000 former volunteers and staff who contributed to making us what we are today, please get in touch to find out how you can be involved and let us know what you are doing today.