Camfed was founded in 1993 by Ann Cotton to support girls to go to school who would otherwise be denied an education because of poverty. The idea for Camfed came from after a research trip to Zimbabwe in which she came to believe that the low enrollment of females in school was due to poverty that did not allow them to cover the school fees. It began with support for 32 girls to attend secondary school in two rural districts of Zimbabwe. By 2017, Camfed had supported more than 1.5 million children through education in a network of 5,500 schools in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.