Zitat des Tages von Ann Cotton:
Camfed has worked for more than two decades in partnership with poor families, transforming this desire for girls' education into reality, and showing the measurable benefits of girls' education for all of us.
Have faith in your intuition and listen to your gut feeling.
To expose the hardships experienced by children who are deprived of the right to attend school, Camfed has produced a series of films about educational exclusion. 'Every Child Belongs in School' provides a glimpse into the lives of children who have been forced by poverty to leave school at a very young age and take a difficult life path.
When I first worked in Zimbabwe, I was a complete novice. I was doing a study, and I continued to learn more and more through the years. And where I have learned most is in the village, from the communities.
Confidence is instrumental to those climbing out of poverty.
At base, financial literacy is inextricably connected to control over one's future.
There are 45 million children in Africa who are not in school. While other children are learning, exploring, and growing in the myriad ways that children were meant to grow, these children are trapped in a life of constant struggle. Without education, how can they be expected to escape such struggle? How can their children?
All children everywhere deserve the opportunity that is unlocked for them by education.
The culture of philanthropy is alive and very well in Africa. International aid strengthens and extends it, but in the communities where I have spent time, it is all-pervasive.
Be greedy for social change, and your life will be endlessly enriched. The only failure lies in not trying, or giving up.
Camfed graduates are active in their villages using their skills and resources to improve as many lives as possible. They are teaching financial literacy to marginalized women and bringing vital health care information to rural schoolchildren. Through example, they are demonstrating the power of philanthropy.
You can't raise the aspirations of a child and then leave them hanging. Poverty can't be solved by a project. It's solved by a relationship, collaboration.
The aim of militants such as Boko Haram, whose very name means 'Western education is a sin,' is to sow hatred and enmity between Muslim and Christian communities, which have co-existed largely peacefully for generations. Education, in particular the education of women, is a threat to Boko Haram's goals.
I have seen the transformative effect that education has in the lives of young women and their communities.
The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.
If women have an income, they will invest a higher proportion of that income in their children than men do. So you do get those societal returns very quickly.
For more than 20 years, Camfed has supported a generation of African girls and women with access to secondary and higher education, employment opportunities, and, ultimately, into positions of leadership.
I recall an 18-year-old girl named Rachel in Zambia who was given a grant to start a business of her choosing. She decided to breed goats so she could sell the meat and the milk, and donate the kids to orphan children. She herself was an orphan, stepping into young adulthood with no resources, and it was her first opportunity to earn her own money.
If you can't send your daughter to school when you know it will help her, you feel a sense of failure, and you feel that failure deeply.
All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.
The exclusion of girls from education is an issue of justice. But it's also an issue of economics because it's holding families, communities, and nations back. The chiefs are often a bridge between the traditional and the modern world and are very powerful implements to change.
The organization I founded in 1993, Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education), was in large part inspired by the generosity shown to me by a community in a village in Zimbabwe. During my visit to Mola to research girls' exclusion from education, the people of Mola fed me, shaded me, walked and talked with me for hours each day.
I hear, 'But why do poor people make such bad decisions?' But actually, their decision-making can be far more complex than that of the better-off in many ways. They're not financially illiterate: they're constantly weighing up choices based on the reality of poverty. Somehow the international development community has resisted accepting this.
In the family pattern, men support boys and women support girls, and because women have far fewer financial resources, there is less money to invest in girls.
I am honoured to join education innovators like Ms. Vicky Colbert, Dr. Madhav Chavan, and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as the fourth WISE Prize for Education Laureate. I accept this prize on behalf of the million girls Camfed is committed to supporting through secondary education.
