Never take your eye off the ball. Always remember that you and everyone on the team is the servant of the cause - in our case, girls' education and young women's leadership in Africa.
Be greedy for social change, and your life will be endlessly enriched. The only failure lies in not trying, or giving up.
Have faith in your intuition and listen to your gut feeling.
For more than 20 years, Camfed has supported a generation of African girls and women with access to secondary and higher education, employment opportunities, and, ultimately, into positions of leadership.
Women's vulnerability around money is hardly exclusive to Africa. Throughout the world, women struggle with financial power. In the West, women's financial literacy is notably lower than men's. That lack of knowledge means that many women slide into poverty when they become widows.
At Camfed, we have focused on transforming the vicious cycle of poverty in many rural African communities into a cycle of opportunity. Alumnae of Camfed's programs go on to become role models and mentors for future generations of young students. We call this the 'virtuous circle,' and we know this is a model that works.
When I first worked in Zimbabwe, I was a complete novice. I was doing a study, and I continued to learn more and more through the years. And where I have learned most is in the village, from the communities.
Poverty is more than a material experience; it's a psychological state as well, one that is infused with anxiety. And decision-making is very complex because every decision you make has an impact on your future and survival.
Poverty diminishes confidence. So if someone offers you a grain store, even if you really need a plough, you take what is offered to you.
The aim of militants such as Boko Haram, whose very name means 'Western education is a sin,' is to sow hatred and enmity between Muslim and Christian communities, which have co-existed largely peacefully for generations. Education, in particular the education of women, is a threat to Boko Haram's goals.
At base, financial literacy is inextricably connected to control over one's future.
In the family pattern, men support boys and women support girls, and because women have far fewer financial resources, there is less money to invest in girls.
The organization I founded in 1993, Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education), was in large part inspired by the generosity shown to me by a community in a village in Zimbabwe. During my visit to Mola to research girls' exclusion from education, the people of Mola fed me, shaded me, walked and talked with me for hours each day.
The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.
I am honoured to join education innovators like Ms. Vicky Colbert, Dr. Madhav Chavan, and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as the fourth WISE Prize for Education Laureate. I accept this prize on behalf of the million girls Camfed is committed to supporting through secondary education.
There are 45 million children in Africa who are not in school. While other children are learning, exploring, and growing in the myriad ways that children were meant to grow, these children are trapped in a life of constant struggle. Without education, how can they be expected to escape such struggle? How can their children?
To expose the hardships experienced by children who are deprived of the right to attend school, Camfed has produced a series of films about educational exclusion. 'Every Child Belongs in School' provides a glimpse into the lives of children who have been forced by poverty to leave school at a very young age and take a difficult life path.
You can't raise the aspirations of a child and then leave them hanging. Poverty can't be solved by a project. It's solved by a relationship, collaboration.
I hear, 'But why do poor people make such bad decisions?' But actually, their decision-making can be far more complex than that of the better-off in many ways. They're not financially illiterate: they're constantly weighing up choices based on the reality of poverty. Somehow the international development community has resisted accepting this.
I have seen the transformative effect that education has in the lives of young women and their communities.
