Who Teaches Us Most About Financial Programing in Africa?

Abstract

words, softly spoken by an 18-year-old Zimbabwean woman, describe the absence of money in her life, aside from its role in creating conflict and anxiety at home. She spoke at a Camfed workshop held for young rural women who had just graduated from secondary school to help them seek solutions to the lack of productive livelihoods open to them in their rural area. Her words were her starting point, and they needed to be ours. Camfed is an organization founded in 1993 and dedicated to the advancement of rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa by investing chiefly in the education of girls and the strategies that grow their leadership and status. Young educated women living in poor communities are Camfed’s teachers. They are members of a vast group whose potential to transform their own lives— and those of their families, communities, and nations—is limitless. Programs that are built on listening to and learning from such women have the best chance of achieving progress. This paper describes Camfed’s journey of investment in designing, implementing, and measuring programs to achieve the financial inclusion, with all its attendant benefits, of young rural women in five countries of subSaharan Africa. In 1999, Lucy Lake and I, along with the first four hundred secondary school graduates of Camfed’s program in Zimbabwe, launched Cama (the Camfed Association). It was designed as a rural membership organization and support network to extend into young adulthood the friendships these women had made during their secondary school education. At the program launch in Harare, young women graduates from all participating districts came together and recognized, for the first time, that they were a national presence. Over three days, the members designed their organizational structure, including the process for selecting officers. They elected the first Cama chairperson, Angeline Murimirwa, who is now executive director of Camfed Zimbabwe and Camfed Malawi. The members decided that Cama would be an organization of young women united by a background of rural poverty and a commitment to improving lives in their communities. Today,