At the Tanzanian office of Camfed International, they are used to turning down bizarre applications for loans. But Lydia Wilbard, programme officer for the educational charity, clearly remembers the strangest one they received. This occurred when a hopeful entrepreneur requested a £25 business start-up grant for an unusual and even poignant reason: she needed the cash to bribe the police not to harass her over her proposed business, which was money-lending.
The application was refused, as Camfed couldn’t be seen to be complicit in corruption. But cases such as these highlight the tricky day-to-day operational conundrums and dilemmas that face the charity. And, as Camfed, which the Financial Times is supporting in a seasonal appeal, gets more deeply involved in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana, the four African countries where it operates, it is constantly assessing and adjusting its activities to combat such problems.
Perhaps the broadest difficulty it faces is one familiar to many development organisations: while it wants to pour as much money as possible into funding girls’ education, it knows that there are limits to how much the system will bear. Too much money paid out too quickly can lead, at best, to diminishing returns and, at worst, to harm, as it creates more possibilities for waste and misappropriation.
For example, symptoms of overload are appearing in the otherwise praiseworthy push by the Tanzanian government to get children into secondary school and improve on a dismal enrolment rate of 13 per cent. In Iringa, in the centre of the country, and one of Camfed’s first areas of activity in Tanzania, the number of secondary schools has risen from four to 26 in just a few years. But, in one of these schools, only the two classrooms that received government funding are finished. The other five – which rely on local community financing – remain half-built.
Camfed, whose own revenues have almost doubled over the past two years to a forecast £3.84m this year, is well aware of these dangers. In Zambia, where it has expanded the scope of its operations from 10 to 18 districts in the past year, it is running a series of studies aimed at assessing how well local communities are using their increasing funding. Matildah Mwamba, Camfed Zambia’s technical director, says: “We have got so many schools and so many districts. We need to be more strategic.”
Another laudable initiative with a potentially dangerous side effect is the effort to combat HIV/Aids. In the rural district of Samfya, in north-eastern Zambia, the local clinic estimates that the number of people taking HIV tests all but tripled year-on-year in the nine months to September this year, due in part to a government campaign. The sting in the tale, however, is that HIV-negative girls are more tempting prey for the kind of men who want to target them during their long walks between school and home. That is why Camfed funds the building of hostels, where female students can stay safely on campuses.
Some of the difficulties facing Camfed emerge from the difference between the rules governing schools and the realities of working on the ground. In Zambia, for example, Camfed says it has begun to pay more attention to access to primary education, even though early years schooling is, in theory, free and open to all. The reason is that primary school girls are being removed in large numbers to do domestic work or because they are being charged fees, such as termly levies to pay security guards.
Camfed hopes that the more it understands some of these underlying social problems, the better able it will be to target its help. In Zambia, where the charity has operated since 2002, Bartholomew Tembo, education officer in the Samfya district, describes how its enduring presence and willingness to learn has helped dispel the initial scepticism of local people. “From my point of view,” he says, “Camfed is doing very, very well. I think the impact is much bigger than ever before”.
