(delivered at the launch event for the Financial Times 2007 seasonal appeal)

At the age of 13, when I had just completed my first year of secondary school education, my father lost his job as a general hand at a meat processing plant in the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare. Every year from that point on, my family and I struggled to scrape together enough money to ensure that I could stay in school. My parents were barely able to raise the $42 in annual school fees for my second year of secondary school, so I had to work to pay for notebooks, pens and other school materials. On weekends, I woke up at 4:30 am to travel from village to village selling vegetables. I would get back home around 9:00 am, and then go to the local market to continue selling vegetables for up to eight hours a day. Despite all this effort, I only earned the equivalent of 30 cents a day. (more…)

As an administrator for the ministry of education and a member of Camfed’s Community Development Committee in Iringa, Tanzania, Mary Mwakajwanga helps monitor Camfed’s work on the ground. Because Camfed’s programs are designed to reach the most vulnerable girls in any given community, Mary has encountered dozens of girls in the course of her work who have migrated to the city to do domestic labor. Her mission: to track down children who have been forced by difficult circumstances to leave school and work for a living, and to offer them the opportunity to re-enroll in school with Camfed’s support.

Fatina Kiluvia talked to Mary Mwakajwanga about the conditions that drive young people to leave their families in search of jobs that offer little compensation and a high risk of abuse.

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I started school late, at age thirteen. It was very difficult to relate to other students since I was the oldest person in the class. Whenever I made a mistake the other students would laugh at me.

Furthermore, I was always falling behind in my lessons. I lived with my aunt in the Karaga District of northern Ghana, and during harvest time – four months out of every year – I was removed from school to help my family with farming. Many times, I came close to dropping out of school as my parents could not take care of the fees. We were very poor. I was even going to school with bare feet. (more…)

I am the fifth of seven children and my mother raised us on her own, so we were always struggling. I was never certain from one year to the next whether I would be able to go to school. But I was fortunate: In Kilombero District where I grew up in central Tanzania, there were three mothers who were passionate about education, and if they saw that a girl was unable to go to school they found it so painful that that they had to help. They supported me up to standard seven (seventh grade). (more…)

Orphaned at the age of ten, Talent is now one of the top students in her class at medical school

When Talent was ten years old, her mother left the rural village where she and her three children lived in Zimbabwe to look for a job. She never returned. Two years prior to that, at the age of eight, Talent had lost her father to kidney failure. Now parentless, Talent and her two younger siblings were taken in by their aunt, a shopkeeper. She struggled to support the children, barely managing to scrape together the money to send them all to primary school. (more…)

When Abigail’s parents died of AIDS, she was forced to drop out of school. She went to live with her elderly grandmother in rural Zambia, who struggled to support her orphaned granddaughter. With Camfed’s help, 18-year-old Abigail is about to finish her final exams at school. Today, she dreams of becoming a journalist or an accountant. (more…)