CAMFED Association

What?

A network of peers using their lived experience as a driver of social change.

Who?

Angeline Murimirwa, CAMFED Executive Director – Africa, Founding Member of the CAMFED Association (CAMA)

Where?

Across sub-Saharan Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi)

The CAMFED Association of women leaders educated with CAMFED support, is the largest network of its kind in Africa. Young women from rural communities use their education to benefit others, and work to break the cycle of poverty for good.

In partnership with donors and rural communities, CAMFED, through the leadership of CAMFED Association members, offers training, technology, business loans, and mentoring support to young women at the critical time when they leave secondary school and may be under pressure to marry young, or to leave their rural communities for jobs in towns or cities, where they are extremely vulnerable.

CAMFED Association members are teachers, business entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, social workers and local political leaders, all with a strong and intimate understanding of the barriers to girls’ education, putting themselves at the forefront of dismantling those barriers, and rallying everyone in their communities to do the same.

“The CAMFED Association’s power lies in its institutional, as well as its emotional, infrastructure. Members are deeply committed to ‘plowing back’ the benefits of their education into their communities.”

The big vision for the CAMFED Association is: to support millions more vulnerable children to stay in school, learn and succeed.The big vision for Big Picture Learning is: all students live happy and successful lives of their own design –

They do this by connecting and supporting each other – with elected leadership from local to regional level – and using their experience and expertise to support more girls and young women to do well in school, and acquire the skills, tools and access to resources to lead independent and fulfilling lives after school.

Having received funding from CAMFED in 1998 to help her continue in education beyond primary school, Angie and 400 other recipients graduated high school into a ‘post-graduate abyss’.

There were no prospects, no job opportunities, no clear path in terms of continuing education for Angie and her fellow graduates. Micro-finance institutions saw them as too risky to invest because they were all women.

When asked by CAMFED, ‘what next?’ the group founded the CAMFED Association. Initially it was just for them as a group of educated women to empower and support each other to navigate their post-school lives. Now, the association makes up one of three vital components of CAMFED’s Operational Model, having evolved into a bigger, better, more sophisticated movement for supporting young women as they leave school but also for supporting other generations that are still getting into school.

1: The start point

Harnessing lived experiences

Angie and her fellow CAMFED Association founding members recognised the value of their own experiences as young women who had overcome some of the barriers other young women were facing. Not only did they feel they couldn’t walk away from that, but also that they had a unique contribution to make.

“Whenever we went back to our communities we realised that the same challenges that threatened to keep us out of school were still bedevilling those that remained behind. We knew where the power lay, but we also knew where the traps lay. So it was about drawing on our own lived experience to be able to shape our responses.”

2: Taking off

Challenging false narratives

Angie emphasised the importance of challenging some of the engrained perspectives that felt at odds with the network’s experiences. Importantly, they wanted to recognise the commitment of parents and guardians in their community to education – something that had been lost in the narrative about girls’ education.

“Most of the literature at that time tended to say that our communities did not care about their children’s education. That narrative did not resonate with our own personal experiences, so it was also a burden for us to be able to say this is not the life that we live, it doesn’t talk about the communities that we are coming from, it’s not making sense.”

Engagement at all levels

Angie is adamant that all stakeholders – parents and guardians, community and civic leaders, government officials – should be engaged in the mission, regardless of whether they are champions of or blockers to girls’ education, particularly if they are people in positions of power.

“We involve everybody who has anything to do with the children that we work with. One of the things that we have learnt, both from our own lived experience as young people, but also from working with CAMFED, is we need to be willing to engage with everybody.”

Shared ownership

CAMFED Association members go beyond engagement and emphasise shared ownership of the mission. They work in a way that ensures the problems and solutions are owned by the community they are working with and the people on the frontline. They make sure they cost the investment that everybody is making, whether financial or non-financial, so that contribution is recognised and shared.

“You must be willing to collaborate, to negotiate, to manage your power to make change happen. It’s not a 1% thing or a one organisation thing, it is a collective, it is about doing it together.”

3: Keeping going

Peer networks that foster exchange

CAMFED Associatin members are purposeful in how they connect people they work with locally, regionally and nationally. They see value in supporting colleagues to share learning and bounce new ideas off one another, as well as in the sense of comradery that comes from connections with peers.

“For every group that we work with we ensure that there is a peer support group. So it might be for a district schools inspector that is working for the remotest districts in the country, they know that they are not alone. They are connected, they are exchanging ideas, and if there is somebody who is doing it better. We make sure that there is, you know, an opportunity for them to make exchanges.”

A power sharing model

Angie and fellow founding members of the CAMFED Association were strategic in how they leveraged CAMFED’s tried and tested infrastructure and systems of accountability and accounting for resources for girls’ education, while recognising the need to have a flexible governance arrangement that is agile and can be renewed as new generations of young women join the network.

“The CAMFED Association is an integral part of CAMFED, with our members using their expertise to design, and lead, on CAMFED programs, bringing their communities with them.”

Bring achievements to the attention of policy makers

CAMFED has memorandums of understanding with government ministries in the countries they work with. Together with elected leaders in the CAMFED Association, CAMFED proactively engages ministries in understanding the achievements of communities and what investments have been made by parent support groups, for example, who set up meal programmes at schools, build infrastructure, and ensure girls’ safety. Together, they make the case for governments to further support the great work, and feed best practice into the school system as a whole.

“We say how much communities are bringing into the education of their own children: this is how much we brought in, this is the gap that you should be bringing as a government, and this is how we can do this together next time.”

A pipeline of new people and fresh ideas

CAMFED is a sustainable movement by design. More than that, it benefits from a continuous supply of young women with different lived experiences and new ideas, as CAMFED clients graduate. That helps this unique movement to be ever growing and ever evolving.

“In 2018 the national Chairperson for the CAMFED Association in Zimbabwe was Tendai. She was 20 just at the point when the Association became 20 years old. She was born 6 months after the CAMFED Association was formed!”

Belonging and celebration

Angie highlights that the biggest incentives for involvement in the network hasn’t only been financial support, but also the feeling for young women that they are making a change beyond what they could have achieved on their own. Celebrating as a community of practice, a broader movement, within and between countries, is a powerful enabler for sustainable change.

“We make sure that all groundbreaking or promising practices are celebrated publicly, and also that young women will not be judged if they make a mistake. This means a lot for some people whose work might never have been recognised.”

System impact

• By the start of 2020, the CAMFED Association already had 150,000 members from across 5 countries, and in 2018 alone, members supported over 700,000 children in primary and secondary school.
• Child Protection guidelines developed by CAMFED with Association members for use in schools have been rolled out nationally in Zambia.

Learner impact

• 45% of CAMFED Association members occupy community, district and national leadership positions.
• “Our investment in members is paying huge dividends, as young women are extending partnerships, developing innovative programmes, galvanizing change in their communities, and leading the movement in support of girls’ education.”
• The young women who went on to run business enterprises have seen a return on investment of over 390%.
• Young people who received loans through CAMFED’s loans facility with partner Kiva, having been considered unbankable by traditional microfinance programmes, have a loan repayment rate over 98%.