It takes a lot to persuade people these days to spend more than four minutes on a video and yet I am suggesting that you spend 64 minutes on this talk. For me this was the most powerful IATEFL2015 plenary (though Kuchah Kuchah’s comes a close second). What shines through this story is faith in people. Once again ingrained stereotypes were swept away, this time, the one about the lack of education for girls being an indication of how little ‘these people’ cared for their daughters. Watch it, but if you haven’t got time then maybe this summary will whet your appetite to come back later. My words can’t really do justice to this so I really do urge you to watch the video.
Ann Cotton is the founder of Camfed (Campaign for Female Education) which provides schooling for girls in developing countries. There are countless organisations that do this though patently even now, not enough, but CamFed distinguishes itself from the others in its approach which takes the girls as their starting point.
Cotton led us very skilfully into the story by referring to the Peterloo Massacre which had happened in Manchester 200 years ago, an example of a fight for justice which was met with repression by the authorities. The next connector was a personal one as Cotton recounted how her Welsh grandparents had been forced off the land (by technological developments) and into the mines of South Wales. So this segued nicely into her study village in Zimbabwe which was made up of people who had been forcibly relocated from their riverine culture to an arid place which could not sustain them and which forced them into the cash economy, a cash economy which only the boys could safely enter. Thus the boys became important wage earners and it made sense to maximise their chances by supporting them with resources such as food and education. Marrying the girls off early also makes sense as they then cease to be a burden on the family. And economics even affects maternal death in childbirth. The labouring women can be taken, with difficulty, to a clinic where the treatment is free, but if they die, then the families must pay to bring their bodies home. So better to let them endure and die in the village.
The way in which Cotton arrived at the village and started speaking with the families there, finding out about their hopes and aspirations as well as their problems was maybe textbook. But her next move ensured that she had the support of the villagers. Rather than calling a meeting herself, she consulted the local head of the community who thought it would be a good idea. Given that the meeting was on the topic of helping the girls, Cotton was not expecting a big turnout but because of course, received wisdom was that ‘these people’ don’t care about their girls. But it turns out that, of course they do care about their girls and because it was organised by a trusted elder, hundreds turned up.
What was so moving about this story was the way in which the girls were at the centre of the whole project and their needs constantly taken into account. So it wasn’t just education but education plus food. Once they graduated from school the next challenge was getting them into work and so vocational education was added to the mix. In secondary school the students are studying in a second language and their teacher often doesn’t speak their native language so the idea of teaching assistants was born using CAmFed alumni. After working as teaching assistants they were well-placed to move into teacher training themselves. And so some of them came home as teachers, who would act as a role model and be a source of authentic experience to their students. And some Camfed students have gone on to become actors on the world stage. As Cotton said, ‘Think what we might have lost had we not educated these girls!’
What I liked about this initiative was that it was adapted to each new country as they expanded. They started with 32 students and have now educated over a million. But my favourite bit was the slide showing the resources needed to achieve this amazing result. What I liked about this slide was the absence of finance as a resource even though the different resources are phrased in accounting terms.
The basic resource was the girls themselves and the additional resources needed were social capital (the goodwill of the community and family responsibility), institutional capital (such as the community leader who enabled that first meeting) and knowledge capital (local knowledge which is often quite deep despite low literacy rates). So what are we to learn from this?
The culture of poverty keeps girls out of school, not the poverty of culture.
See an 11 minute interview with Ann Cotton below: