Tuesday November 4 2008 was a noteworthy day not just in the United States but in the Cambridge offices of Camfed, where we spent most of the day on a lengthy Skype-call to the charity’s directors in Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. We reviewed a year’s worth of data from the field on the effects of Camfed’s work for girls’ education and women’s empowerment.
The collection of the information has been a huge exercise for our teams in Africa, involving hundreds of community workers trained to use PDAs to record more than 2,000 in-depth interviews in each country – and the findings include a rich set of facts and figures about schooling, businesses and communities. Analysis of the results will help us effect more of the positive change Camfed strives for. As we reviewed our own data, we realised that the night’s other results – from the US, and rather more quickly analysed – were also going to be worth staying up for. Despite the long day, we decided to have dinner and watch the election coverage together.
The following morning the messages started to come in from our African colleagues. I have never seen so many exclamation marks as in those delighted e-mails. Some quoted Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” I don’t know the original source of the next thought but it was shared time and again as the e-mails flew across continents: “Rosa sat, so Martin could walk, so Barack could run, so our children could fly.” I am going to Africa later this month, and I know I will find this thought neatly written on many classroom walls.
As I reflect on these upcoming trips and the results of our survey, I realise how much we have benefited from the Financial Times’ two Christmas reader appeals in 2006 and 2007. The money raised, an incredibly generous total of £2.3m, has already supported 7,520 vulnerable girls in Africa, and some of those funds are being used to support our programme expansion into a new country for Camfed – Malawi. I will be working with local staff to put in place a programme to help girls move from primary into secondary school, as this is when the majority of girls from poor backgrounds drop out. We will also develop a peer network and mentoring programme for girls moving on from school to higher education, training or business. It’s the model we’ve rolled out in Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, where, last year, we reached 408,485 schoolchildren.
The young women we have supported have, without exception, come from the poorest of backgrounds. Many are orphans who have been brought up by grandmothers, prematurely aged themselves, and for whom just a dollar a day would be wealth. These girls and women understand the psychological and social battles that need to be overcome in a life of poverty. And they understand the transformative power of education. Our alumni network of young women is now more than 10,000-strong, and they in turn support the education of a further 47,369 children. It’s a huge, growing, and inspiring network of connected people.
I travel a lot for Camfed – and not only to Africa. Last week I was in Dubai, at a meeting of the Councils of the World Economic Forum where 1,000 delegates participated in what was billed as the “biggest brainstorm ever”. At the closing plenary we called for the billions of marginalised people to be engaged in the debate to find solutions to the huge challenges the world faces. B etween conference sessions, I caught a news report that the power-sharing talks between Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC had broken down. The situation in Zimbabwe is now so bad that people in the villages have to get up in the pre-dawn to forage for wild fruits before the baboons, whose food source they are. It is almost unbelievable to think that people are competing with baboons for nourishment. Such desperate conditions notwithstanding, we still receive inspirational information from Zimbabwe. In the villages where Camfed works, many of the schoolteachers aren’t local, and have no family to support them – but the communities are now providing for their teachers, bringing food to school from their own meagre provisions.
It is impossible not to be hugely inspired by the girls and young women whom we meet through Camfed. Cindy, who featured in an article on women and development in the FT magazine of September 27, is typical. Cindy wants to be Zambia’s chief justice. When I first met her she told me about a film she had seen on TV as a small child. She shared every detail of the story of a murder trial, and her own excitement at the final verdict when the judge banged his “hammer” and pronounced “guilty”. So, she explained, “I want to work for justice.”
“Justice for whom?” I asked, to which I got a quizzical look and the firm reply, “Justice for all.” Cindy is an orphan who, after the death of first her father and then her mother, even subsequently lost her adoptive aunt, but I know she will make it: she has a fine brain and a heart to match.
I was thinking of women like Cindy when I spoke at the Woman of the Year lunch at London’s Guildhall last month. The lunch – an annual event celebrating women’s achievements – was founded in 1955 and brings together women from almost every sphere of life. Guests at the Guildhall included Olympians, businesswomen, social campaigners and famous faces from the media.
I was there to accept the Window to the World Award, given to “a woman who has brought attention to a neglected international issue”. I had started Camfed in 1991 as the Campaign for Female Education after being shocked by the lack of educational opportunities for girls in rural Zimbabwe – and now, 17 years later, I was receiving an award from Sarah Brown, the prime minister’s wife.
Guests at lunch were described as “ordinary women doing extraordinary things”. Dare I suggest that we banish the use of that word “ordinary”? We need to have a new starting point for human relations, that of recognising and nurturing the extraordinary potential of each individual. With such a starting point we have the opportunity to harness each person’s remarkable potential and work together to solve the global challenges we face. Thank you again for all you have enabled Camfed and these extraordinary women to achieve.
Ann Cotton OBE is founder and executive director of the charity Camfed; www.camfed.org.
The FT’s 2008 seasonal appeal on behalf of WaterAid begins on Monday November 24
