“At the time it was literally me at the kitchen table,” says Ann Cotton, founder and president of Camfed. Now, the Cambridge-based charity is celebrating its 20th birthday and is one of the leading voices on girls’ education in international development, counting among its high-profile supporters former American president Bill Clinton and actress Emma Watson. 

Cotton, a former teacher, visited the village of Mola in the Nyaminyami district of Western Zimbabwe while studying at the London Institute of Education in order to look at the imbalance in the education of boys and girls. “When I first went to Zimbabwe, and really saw the extent of the problem,” she says, “I stood before it with a sense of complete humility and hopelessness really.”

She founded the charity three years later “as a personal response to what the community and what families had been telling me,” explains Cotton. “I was in a position to make that difference.” Not everyone was supportive. “There were a lot of naysayers who said, ‘Well this won’t work, it’s definitely about culture. You’ll find that girls will be pulled out of school after 6 months or so when families have realised they have lost their labour.’”

Many in the field still considered the gender gap in education to be a result of cultural attitudes, rather than a product of poverty. Cotton points to the problem of these perceptions caused by the transferral of responsibility: “The poor are often presented as an amorphous mass of poor people – ‘if only they would make the right decision’. “The reality is that they cannot make the decision that is of benefit to their children”.

“In some ways perhaps it could be argued that if we lay the responsibility for the exclusion of children in the hands of poor parents, then it does not become a problem of poverty, it becomes a problem of poor choices. And for me, the issue is one of poverty, the brutality of poverty and the choices that are enforced in that context.”

Over the last 20 years, Camfed have supported two million girls through education across five countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In the last fourteen months alone, the charity has received $150 million in funding.

Yet, the organisation remains comparatively small, with only 164 members of staff working across seven offices, with officesin Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia operating in addition to the Cambridge office in Castle Street and an American base in San Francisco. The charity operates on a policy of recruiting from the countries themselves, rather than sending expats out to Africa. Cotton explains that large numbers of staff are simply unnecessary: “We have 91,000 volunteers in Africa and 5,000 partner schools. This is what Camfed is.”

While explaining the importance of developing “organic partnerships” with local communities to allow the programme to operate, Cotton recalls a large village meeting called by the chief at Mola on her second visit back in 1991 where “the community decided that the education of children was the responsibility of all.” A committee was established representing parents and schools, who would decide which girls were in the greatest need. This model is still employed by the charity today, with volunteers working in around 2,000 communities to help get girls into education.

In 1998, an alumnae association called Cama was set up, which comprised the first 400 girls to have received Camfed busaries. Graduates of the programme end up in a wide range of jobs, from teachers to lawyers and businesswomen. The group aims to promote female leadership and peer mentoring, with members working as activists within the community to help a new generation. By 2015, Cama will have around 50,000 members.

One of Camfed’s first beneficiaries, Angeline Murimirwa, is now the Executive Director of Camfed in Zimbabwe and Malawi. Born to subsistence farmers in the rural district of Sadza, her family could not have afforded to send her to secondary school without Camfed’s support. Becoming director of Cama at just 26, Angeline serves as a prime example of how the charity’s projects can lead to female empowerment.

The lack of access to education for girls leads to “an incredible waste of human potential in a world that frankly can’t afford it,” Cotton argues. “The relationship between girls’ education and the welfare of the population is very acute. Educated women have children who are likely to be well, can thrive, are likely to go to school, and they are likely to have far fewer children.”

“There is a direct relationship between global security and the education of girls. The world to a certain extent has woken up to this fact.”

Over recent years, there has been an increased focus within the field of international development on investing in girls and women. Last July, London hosted a family planning summitat which more than $2.6bn was pledgedfor the next eight years to expand access to contraception for 120 million women in the global south by 2020. Speaking at a conference yesterday, International Development Secretary Justine Greening emphasised the importance of making the “women and girls agenda” a “central plank of the DfID (explain the acronym) agenda”.

Camfed works with teachers, schools and national curriculum departments to improve education in sexual heath and reproductive rights. “Teenage pregnancy, HIV and AIDs among teenage girls are a direct result of poverty. They now use the only resource available to them, which is their bodies,” Cotton says. “Sexual reproductive health becomes part and parcel of the whole programme.”

When asked about the problems that exist within the international development community, Cotton speaks of “a certain arrogance in play” and the problem of a predominantly “top-down industry”. She notes wryly that “African is often seen as a country, not a continent,” further adding that “everyone’s poverty is different.”

The charity has become a model, however, for its governance structures in delivering aid to developing countries, and has worked with the global law firm Linklaters on a report into the most efficient ways for NGOs to support communities in a “lasting and effective way”.

For Cotton, the focus has always been on the community “hold[ing] pride in the process and the “ownership of people in the delivery of solutions”.

“Poor people are not just supposed to be on the receiving end,” says Cotton. “If people feel that they somehow have got to be grateful, that maintains the power dynamic. What we need to do is change that power dynamic completely on its head so for people to see and understand their own power in this to make a difference. Once that happens, then you have change”.

“That’s their success – it’s not Camfed's”.