“Accept yourself for who you are!” One of the students says in Swahili, “Many people want to be rich, but if you don’t accept that you are poor, you will want to steal.” I’m touched by their self-reflections and I feel my lips often curling into that same half-smile, half-pout hybrid expression that my psychotherapist always made whenever I revealed vulnerabilities.

I ask a few students about the My Better World book after class and their responses all resonate with the predominant secular conception of the 21st century self: personally unique, empowered, autonomous, self-aware. In fact, they sound just like adults in the USA when they read a self-help book for the first time. They’re overly enthusiastic converts, celebrating their new found wisdom, insisting that the same curriculum should be available even to younger primary school students. I look around just to make sure I’m not really on some vegan pseudo-ashram in Southern California.

(Photo by Lucy Lake)

“Basic human needs are not just food and shelter,” four girls tell me, “but also love and health.”

Soon my cynicism dissolves. “Basic human needs are not just food and shelter,” four girls tell me, “but also love and health.” I nod in agreement, convinced that some schools in the USA, Europe, and the UK should use this My Better World book. After all, back home I’m increasingly concerned that nobody’s talking about the socio-economic ‘soft-skills gap.’ Folks rarely acknowledge that school-day opportunities for identity exploration, or for students to consider their own personal well-being, are distributed so inequitably. In the USA, for example, the poor get drilled on grit, perseverance, and eye-contact, while the wealthy get creativity, purpose, and empathy.

Here, thanks to Camfed, the poor get purpose, hope, belonging, respect. I tell Lucy Lake how impressed I am with My Better World and she explains that although it was developed in partnership with Pearson, creating it was really a process of aggregating local expertise. This curriculum is apparently specific to sub-Saharan Africa — written in collaboration with members of Camfed’s regional teams, most of whom are CAMA members themselves.

Still, if you ask me, the My Better World content seems pretty universal; it features precisely the sort of focus on autonomy, voice and empowerment that all tweens and teens will need to thrive in a secular, post-industrial global economy. Researchers have linked this sort of identity exploration to “intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition and meaningful learning” (Kaplan, Sinai, and Flum 2014). And I’d argue that one’s ability to flourish in any particular economic epoch is, to a large degree, dependent on having a sense of self that’s framed within the predominant conception of personhood. In our times, that means accepting the individual — as opposed to the household, the tribe, or the Paleolithic band — as the primary socio-economic unit (hence, the current popularity of both the serial entrepreneur and the personality brand).

(Photo by Daniel Hayduk, Courtesy of Camfed International)

If you ask me, the My Better World content seems pretty universal; it features precisely the sort of focus on autonomy, voice and empowerment that all tweens and teens will need to thrive in a secular, post-industrial global economy.

Miraculously, Camfed managed to persuade the Tanzanian government to allow CAMA Learner Guides like Shani to facilitate this Swahili language My Better World curriculum in 151 secondary schools. That’s a pretty significant achievement when you consider that these schools have always been strictly English-language-only. And it was necessary. After all, it would have been disingenuous to ask kids to explore their own identities in a foreign language. So Camfed worked with politicians and community leaders to get permission to teach in Swahili.

While some Tanzanian officials may have been reluctant in the beginning, I suspect they’ve been convinced by now. Student performance has increased by unprecedented amounts (effect sizes of 0.5 in English and 1.0 in Math) at schools that include the Learner Guide program. Retention of marginalized girls has also improved: they are 38% less likely to drop out than girls at comparable schools. What’s more, 84% of head-teachers said the sessions helped students feel more confident about school. 96% of students agreed; they said the My Better World sessions “made them feel more positive about the future.” 97% said it helped them shape their goals. And 95% of the students said that the CAMA Learner Guides were “role models.”

No wonder. The CAMA Learner Guides are not teachers, but rather local community members, local stakeholders — many of whom now serve at the very same schools they once attended. “I’m a link between the school and the community,” Shani explains. Camfed has trained 3,903 young women like her working as Learner Guides in 1,009 schools across Ghana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. They’ve reached 121,212 secondary school children over the past year. In exchange for their commitment, Learner Guides become eligible for interest-free micro loans through Kiva.org. Most of them use the funds to start small businesses.

(Photo by Daniel Hayduk, Courtesy of Camfed International)

Julius Nyerere would probably be appalled. He certainly did not envision an educational trajectory where self-empowerment leads to individual entrepreneurship. But that’s precisely what seems to be working. I visited a few of the CAMA small businesses nearby: some beauty salons, some dress shops. And at each one, I saw proud women — often joined by proud husbands — excited to show off their success. One woman showed me her handwritten bookkeeping system, and explained that she couldn’t do any of this without a good math education.

(Photo by Jordan Shapiro)

I smiled and thought, yes, this is precisely what Julia Gillard, Former Prime Minister of Australia and current chairwoman at the Global Partnership for Education, meant when she spoke to me about “the transformative potential of education” last year. A few months after our conversation, Gillard became Camfed’s patron and said to a group of CAMA Learner Guides in South Africa, “If you can deal with poverty, then the girls, with their inherent strengths, will seize the opportunities given to them. If you can get the right resources to the right girls at the right time, then you will enable them — because they are strong, and they’re smart — to change their lives.”

Members of the local district council, as well as all the headmasters I met, agree. They’ve seen the impact that CAMA Learner Guides and the My Better World curriculum has had on the secondary school kids. Most of them told me they hope Camfed will develop a similar program that brings self-awareness and empowerment to primary-school students too. And almost unanimously, they cited the reduced drop-out rate, explaining that they can usually attribute almost all attrition to just three causes: financial insecurity, family instability, and teen pregnancy. Financial capital only addresses the first. It takes local buy-in to address the second. And they insist that the best way to address teen pregnancy is through precisely this kind of education.

(Photo by Jordan Shapiro)

To drive the point home, Jeanne Ndyetabura, a retired civil servant who used to work in the department responsible for vulnerable children, tells me the story of a local girl. At the time of her first menstruation, the girl had no idea what was going on. Nobody had taught her about her body. All she knew was that she was bleeding from the inside. She was certain that this meant she was dying. So she ran away from the school; she ran to die at home. She didn’t tell anyone, not her friends, not her classmates, not her teachers. Instead, she cried and walked — terrified, worried. But along the way she met a boy. “Why are you crying?” the boy asked. The girl explained and the boy laughed. “You have nothing to worry about,” he told her, “go home, clean up, sleep. Then come back in 7 days and I’ll give you the medicine so this doesn’t happen again.” She did as she was told and this is how she got pregnant.

Jeanne Ndyetabura insists that through education, girls learn more self-respect, they understand their own bodies, they take care of themselves. But I’m wary that this perspective inadvertently places all the responsibility on the girls. I think about the surrounding society’s accountability. I’m certain that the solution is not just an education that teaches girls how to be on their guard against the supposed natural spirit of boys. Instead, complex problems require multi-faceted approaches. And while I’ve seen enough data about girls’ education in the developing world to recognize the accuracy of Camfed’s slogan: “When you educate a girl, everything changes,” I also know that the simplicity of the phrase doesn’t do justice to the organization’s intricate approach. It doesn’t acknowledge the degree to which their work depends on a local community’s “knowledge capital, social capital, and institutional capital.”

These are the terms that Camfed’s founder, Ann Cotton, used when I first met her after she won the 2014 WISE Prize. Knowledge Capital, she explained, “resides in the community itself,” they will always know more about what they need than any outsider. Social Capital describes existing community support systems that need to be mobilized and strengthened rather than replaced. And Institutional Capital refers to pre-existing institutions, like chiefs, schools, churches, and mosques which already have a strong foothold within the community. “You need to honor and dignify what already exists,” Cotton explained.

Lucy Lake (Photo by Daniel Hayduk, Courtesy of Camfed International)

Stuck in Dar es Salaam’s abysmal traffic on the way to Julius Nyerere International Airport, Lucy Lake confirms that the same attitude even permeates Camfed’s outlook on financial capital. “We approach from the assumption that communities want to do what’s best for their children and will allocate the funds accordingly,” she explains, “not from the assumption that people are just out to get the money.”

Most of my readers live in a world where political battles often rage around tiny semantic distinctions between words like “welfare” and “entitlement,” so I expect that people will dismiss Lucy Lake’s perspective as naïve and idealistic. But what I saw in Tanzania was an intricate and sophisticated approach to solving major systemic problems. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a recent Brooking’s Institute report on scaling-up solutions for education, Jenny Perlman Robinson and Rebecca Winthrop explain that Camfed “challenges the common perception that community participation and efficient, accountable management are incompatible in the transition from small single-community initiatives to large-scale, multi-community or multicountry programs.”

I was still sweating in the airport restaurant. Lucy Lake and I were eating cashews and drinking fruit juice while discussing other examples of education programs for the developing world. We shared a mutual appreciation for some and a wariness about top-down, drop-in, and secular missionary-like approaches. I heard them call my flight number over the loudspeaker and I gathered my belongings to head to the gate. In place of goodbye, Lucy Lake paused and spoke as if she wanted to punctuate all of the conversations the two of us had all week. She said, “the distance to school is not only about how far you have to walk.”

A few days after I arrived home, I started hearing all those familiar debates about whether to blame poor student performance on bad schools with lazy teachers, or on toxic home environments with un-engaged caretakers. Frankly, that discussion seems downright silly now. I’ve seen first hand that it is possible to blend Ujamaa socialist values with post-industrial individual entrepreneurship — to create functional community networks, which honor local expertise and mobilize all the stakeholders together, so that they can care for individual students’ well-being, even in the face of extreme poverty.