This article explores the extent to which participation in alternative human values education affects students' conceptions of agency amidst the economic and HIV/AIDS crises in Ndola, Zambia. Drawing on the concept of transformative agency as developed by critical research in education, this study examines conceptions of agency based on data produced through interviews, focus groups and diaries given to pairs of siblings from lower to middle income families one of whom attended a government secondary school in Ndola and the other an alternative school run by a non-governmental organization. This study found that transformative agency was enabled by alternative schooling that attempted to disrupt the reproductive tendencies of state schooling. After graduation, however, students were forced to renegotiate their sense of agency vis-a-vis the larger structural constraints of Zambian society. As such, the limits and possibilities of alternative pedagogy and school structure towards educational equity are analysed and discussed in relation to the field of international and comparative education. (Contains 2 tables and 8 notes.)