The “Gender and Education” working group of Educaid.be organised a brown-bag lunch seminar with Katie Smith, Director of Operations at Camfed International.

Katie Smith talked about Camfed’s model for empowering girls through education, and illustrated it with audio-visual material. After the presentation, participants were able to ask questions during a Q&A session.

Camfed – Campaign for female education – works to eradicate poverty and inequality in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa through educating girls through and empowering young women to step up as leaders. Over the last two decades Camfed has developed and refined a model of investment in these areas that achieves substantial economic and social returns at individual and societal levels, which was recently recognised by the OECD as best practice in taking development innovation to scale.

To date Camfed has supported over 1.4 million children to go to school; its focus on improving the quality and relevance of the learning environment they experience once there, and pushing up their learning outcomes, is reinforced by SDG4.

As Director of Operations for Camfed International, Katie Smith is responsible for developing new partnerships across Camfed’s programmes in Africa, and leads its work on quality education and sustainable futures.