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Delivering Girls’ Education at Scale: Camfed at the Skoll World Forum
This week in Oxford, Camfed CEO Lucy Lake joined social entrepreneurs from around the world at the Skoll World Forum to share solutions to the world’s most profound problems.
The sense of urgency has never been greater: 2015 is a seminal year, as the UN’s Millennium Development Goals make way for a new set of even more ambitious – but vital – Sustainable Development Goals, guiding action over the next 15 years. And absolutely key to eradicating global poverty, world leaders agree, is access to quality secondary education for girls.
Unleashing Girls’ Power
On Friday, April 17th at 10 am (UK) Lucy Lake joined Graça Machel, Memory Banda, Rebecca Winthrop and Mabel van Oranje on a panel entitled Unleashing Girls’ Power. She explained how Camfed’s partnership with communities and engagement with government around girls’ education is responding to the urgency of girls’ exclusion and transforming educational prospects for girls – at scale.
It was 22 years ago that Camfed first challenged conventional development ‘wisdom’ that culture lay behind the massive scale of girls’ exclusion from school, by demonstrating that if you tackle the root cause of poverty, if you give families the means to make a choice, then girls are in school alongside their brothers. Since then, Camfed’s programs have grown to support hundreds of thousands of girls through education, and on from school into secure livelihoods.
Proof of the success of Camfed’s approach is in the young women school graduates who have joined Camfed’s alumnae network, CAMA. “This new force of activists and philanthropists – with a growing membership of more than 33,000 – is now joining local and national authorities to lead change for the younger generation of marginalized girls,” says Lucy. “They are bringing to the table their own experience of poverty, and the power of a pan African peer network, to define and deliver policies and programs that secure every child’s right to safe, quality education, and a life of independence. They are an unstoppable new force who are now changing things for future generations”
Read Lucy’s Skoll World Forum blog: Quality Secondary Education for Girls: How Do We Finance it at Scale?
Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship – Awards Ceremony
Camfed Founder and President Ann Cotton, Skoll Award Social Entrepreneur and winner of the WISE Prize for Education 2014 joined Lucy Lake at the Skoll World Forum. On Thursday, April 16th, between 5:30 and 7 PM BST (12:30 PM Eastern), Ann interviewed Graça Machel, renowned international advocate for women’s and children’s rights, at the Skoll Awards Ceremony, as Ms. Machel received the Global Treasure Award.