UNITED NATIONS GIRLS EDUCATION INITIATIVE

Last week, Camfed Directors Ann Cotton and Brooke Hutchinson and scholarship alumna Enita Mashika attended the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. The event brought government leaders, corporate CEOs, social entrepreneurs, celebrities and philanthropists together to explore innovative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging problems. This year, the meeting focused heavily on girls’ education and women’s empowerment initiatives, and Camfed’s work was highlighted in numerous ways.

On Wednesday, we announced a new and exciting partnership with The Mastercard Foundation and Google. Through this new program, 270,000 young people in rural Ghana and Malawi will receive secondary education, financial literacy and business skills, and information and communications technology (ICT) training. More than 1 million people will benefit.

“Adolescent girls and women in rural Africa face great barriers to economic empowerment,” says Ann. “By providing thousands of girls and women with vital knowledge and skills, this partnership will equip a critical mass of young women to break the cycle of inter-generational poverty and lead economic growth in their communities.”

Click play to watch the press conference.

Our partnership with the global law firm Linklaters was also highlighted during the session “Democracy and Voice: Technology for Citizen Employment and Human Rights.” This joint effort will focus on promoting best practices of governance for nonprofits, based on Linklater’s recent report about Camfed, “Accounting to the Girl.”

Watch the announcement here.

“CGI gave us the tremendous opportunity to highlight some of our generous partners who are investing in change with Camfed for this generation of girls,” says Ann Cotton. “With a primary theme of their annual meeting being ‘Girls and Women,’ CGI is an important forum for many of us working to create real returns for the millions of girls in Africa who are out of school.”