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Camfed

organization

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ5026508
Source-derived summary

CAMFED (also known as the Campaign for Female Education) is an international non-governmental, non-profit organization founded in 1993. The mission of the organization is to eradicate poverty in Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women. CAMFED programs operate in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya.

History

CAMFED was founded in 1993 by Ann Cotton to support girls to go to school who would otherwise be denied an education because of poverty. The idea for CAMFED came from after a research trip to Zimbabwe in which she came to believe that the low enrollment of females in school was due to poverty that did not allow them to cover the school fees. It began with support for 32 girls to attend secondary school in two rural districts of Zimbabwe. By 2017, Camfed had supported more than 1.5 million children through education in a network of 5,500 schools in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. By 2023, Camfed reported helping 6.4 million children in total, including 1.8 million girls in secondary education.

Anticipating the need for post-school economic opportunities for young people in marginalized rural communities, the CAMFED Alumnae Association (CAMA) was established in 1998 to connect young female school leavers and offer pathways to post-secondary school opportunities. CAMA provides a structure through which its members can develop their activism and leadership.

Editorial summary

“Camfed” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Camfed and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1993, 2017, 2023, 1998—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Camfed and organization.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Camfed” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Camfed and organization provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5026508. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2017, 2023 and 1998.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Camfed”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Camfed primary sources, Camfed archive and Camfed research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Camfed”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Camfed” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.