Education crusader gains rare experience working directly with African communities
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FOREIGN VIEWS
Ann Cotton is the Founder and President of Camfed, a non-profit organization tackling poverty and inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. At the end of 2014, Ann was awarded the WISE Prize for Education. On a recent trip to New York, she joined me to talk about global education and what has changed over the many years she has worked on education inequality in Africa.
Q: If one wants to make a difference in education inequality, where should one begin?
A: What you have to do first is listen very hard and learn a great deal. 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.
When I worked in Zimbabwe in the early 90s, I had read a great deal about girls’ exclusion from education. 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.
Q: Since 1993, Camfed has helped many African women to progress. As you look ahead, what else do you believe needs to be done to level the playing field for girls?
A: When Camfed works, we work in an inclusive way. We don’t say that it’s about girls’ education and that we’re going to focus exclusively on girls. It’s really about working with a community while recognizing that the most excluded and most vulnerable are girls.
Social and economic advancement is the priority. And 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.
Q: What advice can you give school leaders to make a more inclusive environment?
A: I am not an expert on this, but I think this goes back to the issue of why girls stayed out of school, based on my research. It wasn’t because parents were resistant, it wasn’t because they didn’t care about the education of their daughters, they just didn’t have the means.
And it’s about understanding that people do, for the most part, make rational decisions in their circumstances. People do not want to be unemployed. So it’s recognizing the psychological dimensions of poverty, and building social systems that are not just technical solutions, but are human solutions.
I know so many young women who are so impressive. Bertha, who is in Ghana, is studying to be a doctor. Her parents work on a commercial farm, and because they lived in a very small place, the only time there was peace was when everyone else was asleep. So she’d go to bed at 7pm, wake at 2am, and study through the night until she went to school, and that was how she did well.
These students are remarkable in their commitment to others. Rather than thinking about individual advancement in their communities, they think about connective advancement and their role within that. Bertha is supported by a Mastercard Foundation scholarship, and we supported her secondary school education. And so we are looking for ways to help students meet their aspirations, and meanwhile thinking about the wider environment.
We are all complex; whether we are born into poverty or privilege there are so many issues that have to be thought through in order to help us develop as complete, confident, ready-to-face-the-world human beings.
I think this is hard in the United States and certainly Britain, where we have become a measurement society.
We live in competitive societies where it is not possible for everybody to get 100 percent. The system is set up to determine where in the pecking order you sit, which creates a huge amount of anxiety for young people.
What we are doing in the best schools is looking at the wider individual.
We have to think about the whole child because one will succeed in many different ways in life and if the education system puts this academic measurement as the main way of measuring, then we place children and institutions under enormous strain.
Q: What does winning the WISE Prize mean to you?
A: This prize gives the issue about which I’m passionate far greater attention. I could never have imagined when I went to that village in Zimbabwe, and met so much patronizing resistance, that the issue of girls’ exclusion from education would be getting so much focus.
Because of the WISE Prize, I have met young women from Georgia and Yemen and Palestine. So my perspective on the world has continued to grow through this experience. For me, the individual is in service to the cause, so I want to do the best job I can to create the greatest possible change in the time I have. This award is very special to me on so many levels.
C. M. Rubin is the publisher of CMRubinWorld and a Disruptor Foundation Fellow.
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