Camfed Founder Featured Speaker at SXSWedu

AUSTIN, Texas - March 11, 2015 - PRLog -- Today, Ann Cotton is in Austin speaking at the annual SXSWedu education conference and festival, which fosters innovation in learning. The founder and president of the international nonprofit Camfed (Campaign for Female Education), and WISE Prize laureate, will lead a session tying data and technology to education and equality in rural communities. She will describe the change that occurs when poor communities participate in the process, and own their data.

Ann’s session, titled “The Power of Data for Poverty Eradication” takes place at noon on Wednesday March 11 at the Austin Convention Center, Room 18ABCD, 500 East Cesar Chavez Street.

“In the field of international development, data flows from poor to rich communities, from development agencies to donors and from the governed to the governing,” says Ann Cotton. “Impoverished people often give away their personal data and do not participate in analysis or receive conclusions. I will discuss how this one-way data flow reflects and sustains asymmetric relationships in the sector and undermines poverty eradication initiatives, and will demonstrate the power of data sharing within poor communities to create positive change.”

Ann will take session participants on a journey from a classroom in rural Malawi to a poor village in Zimbabwe, where Camfed’s girls’ education program has its roots. She will describe the life and death decisions poor families face daily; the effect of poverty on the psyche; the endless anxiety that is exacerbated by encounters with authorities that remind poor people of their inadequacy, collect data on their lives and never share the results. And she will describe how each of these encounters diminishes poor peoples’ ability to grow beyond poverty. Then she will present an innovative alternative approach.

For more than 20 years, Camfed has been providing opportunities to girls and women to lift themselves up, succeed, and perpetuate hope in the most marginalized regions of sub-Saharan Africa. By designing programs in partnership with governments, community leaders, and families in each region, the Camfed model has proven successful and scalable.

Camfed has directly supported more than 1.2 million girls through school, and has impacted more than three million children in the communities they serve. To multiply the impact, the CAMA network of Camfed alumni work as teachers and mentors for the next generation of students.

About Camfed:
Camfed is an international non-profit organization tackling poverty and inequality by supporting girls to go to school and succeed, and empowering young women to step up as leaders of change.  Camfed invests in girls and women in the poorest rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls face acute disadvantage, and where their education has transformative potential.  Since 1993, Camfed’s innovative education programs have directly supported over 1.2 million students to go to school in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi.

In 2014, Camfed was recognized by the OECD for best practice in taking development innovation to scale, and Camfed founder Ann Cotton was awarded the WISE Prize for Education Innovation.