Ann Cotton

Ann Lesley Cotton OBE (born 1950) is a Welsh entrepreneur and philanthropist who was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2006 Queen's New Year Honours List. The honour was in recognition of her services to education of young women in rural Africa as the founder of Camfed. Camfed Innovation and Activities Camfed's goal is to replace the existing cycle of poverty and inequality with a new cycle of empowerment and opportunity. The organisation's unique approach is to not only support girls and young women through school, but also on to new lives as entrepreneurs and community leaders. To complete the "virtuous cycle", graduating students become CAMA alumnae, many of whom return to school to train and mentor new generations of students. Camfed started out by supporting 32 girls through school in Zimbabwe in 1993. Since then it has expanded its success across 2,295 communities in five sub-Saharan countries. Over the past 17 years, 1,065,710 young people directly benefited from Camfed's programmes in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. More than 3 million children have already benefited from Camfed's programmes in a network of 5,085 partner school Camfed won the International Aid and Development Charity of the Year award in 2003. In 2014, Camfed was recognised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for best practice in taking development innovation to scale. Background Cotton was born in Cardiff, Wales, and was educated at Howell's School, Llandaff. For more than three decades, Ann Cotton has been focused on improving opportunity for children at the margins of education. She began her career in a London school by establishing one of the first centres for girls excluded from mainstream education. Cotton's commitment to girls' education in Africa began in 1991, when she went on a research trip to Zimbabwe to investigate why girls' school enrolment in rural areas was so low. Contrary to the common assumption that families weren't sending girls to school for cultural reasons, Cotton discovered that poverty was the main roadblock. Families could not afford to buy books or pay school fees for all their children. Instead, they had to choose which children would receive an education. Since boys had a better chance of getting a paid job after graduation, daughters were rarely selected.