Educate the Girl Child Campaign

Most children in remote rural communities in Zimbabwe fail to attend or complete school due to financial challenges. Some are orphans, parents are unemployed, they are hungry or they have to walk very long distances to go school. Some children will never go to school, and when girls fail to go to school, their likely alternative is that they are at risk of early marriages or vulnerable to abuses at home and in the community. Our solution is to provide education funds targeting those girls who would not otherwise go to school if no one helps them. If this solution is scaled globally, it empowers more women and girls as they create positive economic impact by getting better jobs, and raising educated children. Education for girls reduces their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, trafficking and exploitative labor. Global Health Facts 2012 shows that education for girls reduces the risk of infant mortality.

In Zimbabwe, about 90% of the population were not formally employed in 2017 (New York Times). In remote rural communities, 95% of families survive through subsistence farming. The most dominant resulting effect is that families lack the education funds needed to get their children into school. Failure to pay tuition results from limited employment opportunities for parents. The Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee in 2019 cites that 61% of children are turned away from school for nonpayment of tuition. 20% of children are out of school, and for those who remain 25% do not complete school. 8% of girls between age 13 - 17 are impregnated, and the other 8% loses interest because of long walking distances or hunger. For those in school, absenteeism is common. Only 9.36% girls complete upper secondary education and 7.71% complete post-secondary education. 32 million children are out of school in sub-Saharan Africa. According to UNICEF, 250 million children globally cannot read, write or do basic math. 130 million of them have never attended school. Unfortunately, for girls in remote rural communities they face multiple barriers when they fail to attend schools including lack of employment, the risk of HIV/AIDS, child abuse and the poverty trap.

Our solution includes three components which address challenges that collectively affect girls' ability to attend school. Our solution is to provide education funds and it does the following initiatives:

1. Education scholarships - we award scholarships that cover full tuition, school uniforms and shoes, stationery and limited medical expenses for those children who would not otherwise go to school if no one helps them. They include orphans, the disabled, and children from unemployed or low income families.

2. School feeding initiative - Most of the girls we support have to walk long distances to get to school  and some miss classes because of hunger or helping their parents to work in the fields. By giving them one meal a day, we help them to stay in school and away from household commitments.

3. Leadership interventions - As part of their education, we help our girls to prepare for future leadership roles through emotional development, mentoring, coaching, entrepreneurship training, volunteerism and a program on sexual health and women's rights. We bring speakers and innovators to their classrooms to help them navigate through their career paths.

We support our girls individually depending on what they need for them to succeed. 

By giving education scholarships, coupled with school feeding and leadership interventions, we are giving access to education to those children who would not otherwise go to school if no one helps them. We are targeting children at 13 years particularly those who complete their primary education but fail to proceed to secondary education due to financial challenges. In Zimbabwe, 79% of girls complete primary education, many of them with the support of the Basic Education Assistance Module supported by the UK Department of International Development and the Campaign for Female Education. However, only 9.36% of girls complete upper secondary education, and only 7.71% of girls complete post-secondary education. To understand the needs of these children, we are working with interns from the University of Chicago to do research and storytelling. By understanding the individual stories of our girls, we are continuously convinced that most girls drop out of school because their parents fail to pay for tuition. Our scholarship opportunities help children who are out of school to return to school, and those who are at risk of dropouts to stay in school. Our scholarships also help to reduce household poverty by creating employment opportunities for girls.

Our solution relates to both the selected challenge and the dimension because our provision of education funds or scholarships together with interventions that include school feeding and leadership help to create opportunities for access to education for girls, particularly those who would not otherwise go to school if no one helps them. Children in Zimbabwe are living in an emergency situation exacerbated by many years of political violence and undemocratic governance. Schools lack infrastructure and the government is failing to support the rural majority who are facing drought and starvation. For mothers, children's education is undermined by other urgent priorities.

Our major competitors include the UK Department of International Development's Basic Education Assistance Module, and the Campaign for Female Education. What makes our solution more innovative as compared to these organizations is the impact of our complementary interventions. While they only support girls access to education by providing education funds, our innovative programs that include the school feeding initiative, and leadership interventions such as emotional development, mentoring, coaching, entrepreneurship training, volunteerism and a program on sexual health and women's rights make the most difference to our children. These innovative interventions not only complement access to education but they help us to ensure school completion for girls and strengthens the ability of children to attend school. We believe providing education funds helps kids to have access to education, but they experience high absenteeism and low grades when they go to school hungry. School feeding supports the school health and nutrition initiatives that enhance the students education outcomes. In the long-term, school feeding initiatives contribute to economic development as they allow many kids to complete school. Leadership programs such as emotional development, mentoring and coaching help to build and stimulate confidence in young children which is usually lost when they go through the experiences of hunger, poverty, abuse or child labor at home. Teaching girls about sexual health and women's rights helps them to escape the challenges of abuse, and to protect themselves against the risk of HIV/AIDS. These interventions make our solution unique as they support successful results on our programs.

Computers and online learning softwares are the new technology that our organization is working on. Through our partnership with a Chicago-based nonprofits technology firm called Powered by Action that was founded by Andre Hughes. We are working to create an online platform that allows for remote learning. We would like to use this platform to provide leadership programs. By working with the University of Chicago interns through the Institute of Politics, we would like to create a platform that allows our girls to receive mentoring from the graduate students at the University of Chicago that would be facilitated through the online learning platform. The Powered by Action platform is a nonprofit collaboration technology that provides resources that empower parents, schools, teachers, and partners abroad to fuel student success. The platform makes virtual tutoring, mentoring, and study groups a success. The platform also has capabilities for program delivery including relevant digital content, automated workflows, learning communities, student's access to help, digital wallets that help students to raise funds for their education, and on-demand interventions.

The technology for computers will be provided as hardware by soliciting used computers from technology companies in silicon valley and the disused computers at tertiary educational institutions across the United States. Our software technology is provided by Powered by Action and available on this link: https://www.poweredbyaction.org/. The application is used on desktop web and is also available for use on mobile smartphones for Android and ioS.

Our theory of change includes the following:

Activities - provision of scholarships, school feeding, emotional development training, mentoring, coaching, entrepreneurship training, volunteerism or community action, and a training on sexual health and women's rights.

Outputs - school attendance, learning and development, skills building and confidence.

Short-term outcomes - improved employment for girls, girls become healthier, girls participate in the formal labor market, and girls earn higher incomes.

Long-term outcomes - community development, economic development, improved living standards and health investments, and reduced household poverty.

The solution is currently serving 100 people. In one year, the solution will be serving 500 people, and in the next five years the solution will be serving at least 15 000 - 100 000 people.

Within the next year, we want to focus on program development. From the lessons learnt in delivering our pilot initiatives, we will focus our research and development results on remodeling our programs to better respond to our observations and improve on outcomes. Within the next 5 years, we want to replicate our current pilot initiatives to benefit at least 50 000 to 100 000 more families in remote rural areas of Zimbabwe. We plan to achieve this milestone by: 

1) Stakeholder engagement - improving stakeholder satisfaction, optimizing donor commitments and maximizing stakeholder engagement, 

2) Financial effectiveness - enhancing financial sustainability, maximizing donor investment and building sustainable funding mechanisms, 

3) Operational efficiency - optimizing program delivery, improving administration processes and procedures, improving communication processes and brand visibility, enabling the establishment of operational infrastructure, and improving stakeholder relations mechanisms, 

4) institutional capacity - providing effective leadership, enhancing the capacity of staff, and optimizing IT efficiency and smart technologies.

Potential barriers to the accomplishment of our goals include the impact of COVID-19 on travel challenges and the hosting of public fundraising and networking events. Our work in Zimbabwe continues to expose us to high levels of political risk and the volatility of foreign exchange rates due to the unstable financial economy. Concerns arise around the issues of public safety in the communities we work, due to unpredicted accounts of political violence and political control. This may pose challenges on program expansion in political footholds. In remote rural communities, we may face challenges with cultural and religious barriers that prohibit girls from attending school or that encourage girls to marry at a very young age. 

1. Impact of COVID-19 on travel challenges and the hosting of public fundraising and networking events - we are currently already working on developing an online community for fundraising including upgrading services on our websites, payment gateways, public relations campaigns and online advertising.

2. Political risks and volatility of foreign exchange rates - to counter the political risks, we work with relevant government departments and structures to ensure transparency and assurance that our work involves non-political activities and our policies do not tolerate political involvement. To deal with the risk of volatility of foreign exchange rates, our organization runs its financial administration activities outside of Zimbabwe, and manages its finances through the limited support of local financial institutions.

3. Cultural and religious barriers - through the interventions of our leadership programs that include emotional development, mentoring, coaching, entrepreneurship training, volunteerism and a program on sexual health and women's rights, our students participate in awareness activities and behavioral change interventions to educate parents, community leaders and families in the community.

35 including 2 full-time staff, 3 part-time staff, 19 committed volunteers, 7 interns, 2 independent contractors, and 2 other workers.

The African Community Fund for Education was founded by Stanley Ndambakuwa, on his personal experiences having been raised in a disadvantaged family and struggling to help his parents pay for his tuition. Stanley was born as the only boy in a family of girls, and he knows what it means to have the desire to go to school without the means to pay for tuition. Education changed his life, and he believes many other children who share the same background with him can escape poverty if given the power of an education. Tenacious and driven President and CEO of African Community Fund for Education Group. Talent for working in complicated, volatile environments, building strategic partnerships with government, local, and community leaders. Selected and announced by the Obama Foundation and The University of Chicago as one of the 25 Inaugural Obama Foundation Scholars in Chicago, the only Zimbabwean and one of two Africans selected to represent Southern Africa. Exceptional public speaker and author of the soon-to-be-published title, “One Extra Mile” which talks about the pursuit of dreams, action, service, humility and vulnerability in leadership and life. Stanley has 9 years of experience working leading volunteer and nonprofit programs. His experiences include strategy and planning, budget and spending, resource allocation and procurement, implementation and monitoring, performance reporting and evaluation, progress review and decision making, risk, auditing and compliance, results and data analysis, research and development, and annual reporting.

YWCA Metropolitan Chicago - We are partners in hosting the Annual Girls Education Conference in Chicago. The conference is a half-day summit designed for attendees to learn from and contribute to a discussion on early learning innovations, expanding youth educational experiences, the importance of mentorship, and the economic impact of investing in girls’ education.

John and Jacolyn Bucksbaum Family Foundation - We are partners in delivering pilot education scholarship programs in Zimbabwe, using the methods and interventions derived from participation in leadership programs at the Obama Foundation and at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Institute of Politics - Our partnership is focused on delivering internship programs for students at the University of Chicago. These internships help our organization with staffing and skills requirements, and they also help both undergraduate and graduate students with gaining hands-on experiences.

Obama Foundation - The founder, Stanley Ndambakuwa is an inaugural Obama Scholar. After spending a year of training in the South Side of Chicago, he continues to participate in advanced leadership activities, with the foundation's network. These have helped in developing our programs and raising funds.

Our key partners include individuals, government departments, civil society, schools, private foundations, corporate companies and other nonprofits that provide sources of revenue, human resources and infrastructure that are required for our programming. Our key activities include providing educational services such as scholarships and leadership training. Our value proposition is to provide access to education for girls who are out of school, create employment, sustainability and lower poverty rates for families in the communities in which we work, and for our supporters, we provide them with the opportunity to make a difference on the causes they care about. Our key resources are the schools and communities that we work with collaboratively to deliver our programs to vulnerable children. We work directly with the communities, and we provide our services through the local schools. Our cost structure dedicates the most finances into the scholarship program, which are considered the most expensive and the most important. Our revenue systems include working with private foundations for private funding, grant making foundations, individuals and government support as well as public fundraising.

We bring in money through sustained donations and grants, but we also take advantage of available fundraising opportunities such as public events, and online fundraising.

Our main goal for applying to Solve is to get access to the funding that would help us to deliver change to many more girls in the communities we work. Because of limited funds, we are unable to reach out to every child who needs our support. By applying to Solve we also become a part of the larger network of leaders across the globe who include peers, funders and experts who are part of the Solve community. Attending Solve events is an opportunity for networking with some of the top leaders, and organizations, at one of the world's top academic institutions. We also believe applying to Solve is an opportunity to get access to mentorship and strategic advice from the Solve and MIT networks, that we can only have access to through applying to Solve.

Funding and revenue model - we would like to partner with organizations that would help us to strengthen our financial effectiveness by giving us access to the tools and resources that would further develop our funding mechanisms.

Board members or advisors - since our organization is heading toward the growth phase, we would like to work with industry experts who bring in a diverse range of skills.

Monitoring and evaluation - We need to partner with organizations that can help us set and develop research tools for our monitoring and evaluation so that we can effectively track our impact and monitor the results of our interventions in girls.

Marketing, media and exposure - We believe that our work is important and can attract a great deal of public support. We need support from partners who can help with the tools and skills to reach out to online and physical audiences.

Mastercard Foundation - The Mastercard Foundation is focused on giving education scholarships particularly to disadvantaged youths in Africa, and we believe they would be a great partner in supporting our work financially.

MIT faculties of Media Arts and Sciences, and Comparative Media Studies/Writing - We believe that these faculties would be helpful in supporting our media, marketing and exposure efforts, particularly on brand exposure, public relations and online fundraising.

MIT - We would like to partner with MIT's relevant departments on Monitoring and Evaluation activities. This would be in the form of working with MIT supported interns.

Our programs are focused on giving access to education for girls who would not otherwise go to school if no one helps them. The GM Prize on Learning for Girls and Women would help us to advance our solution by giving more education scholarships to out of school children, and those who are particularly focused on studying along the lines of STEM education. We would also use the relevant technological tools to develop our programs, and promote online learning development.