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.