CAMFED’S MESSAGE
Investing in female education is widely recognised as the most effective way to alleviate poverty and address societal inequality. Investing in the next generation of African female farmers is vital in mitigating against the impact of climate change, building resilience to climatic shocks, and producing healthier, wealthier communities.
CAMFED – enables girls living in sub-Saharan Africa to realise their right to an education and supports their transition after school into economic independence and to step up as leaders of change in their communities. Increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather in Sub-Saharan Africa is resulting in more frequent droughts and floods. Women in rural Africa are the first to feel the effects of climate change as they struggle to cultivate the land in these conditions to produce enough to feed their families. Climate change is therefore compounding the resource gap that women farmers have long faced compared to men. Our Agriculture Guide programme supports aspiring or early stage agriculture entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, through a combination of training and mentoring, along with access to high quality tools and materials, advice and affordable technologies that support improved productivity and climate-smart approaches. This builds their resilience to climate change, and supports women to create businesses that grow food, jobs and opportunities at scale for whole communities.
Ilala supports CAMFED’s agricultural guide programme, and is inspired by women like Clarah Zinyama. She was once on the verge of dropping out of primary school, but received a CAMFED bursary. CAMFED supported her through secondary school too, and on to complete her degree at the Women’s University in Africa in Harare. In 2014, Clarah attended a bespoke course on sustainable agriculture at EARTH University in Costa Rica, developed in partnership with CAMFED. This helped her to launch and grow her business, using the climate-smart techniques that she learnt. As part of CAMFED’s agricultural guide programme, Clarah shares on her knowledge to others in her community so that they apply this to their businesses. She’s the CAMA Chair for Zimbabwe (53,000 members as at July 2019), and sits on CAMFED Zimbabwe’s Board – making decisions which are impactful to people’s lives in her community and country.
Clarah is one of a large network of CAMFED’s alumnae, who recently won the UN Global Climate Action Award – for their potential to scale effective action on climate change! Recipients of this UN Award represent some of the most practical, scalable and replicable examples of what people, businesses, governments and industries are doing to tackle climate change.
For more information on CAMFED, please visit the following links:
Ilala is delighted to be supporting CAMFED, Campaign For Female Education, an international non-profit organisation tackling poverty and inequality by supporting marginalised girls to go to school. The CAMFED network reaches 6,220 partner schools in Zimbabwe, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.