How a writer learned to help Malawi’s girls help themselves
Putting a human face on some cold poverty data started our writer on a nearly two-decade quest to understand how help, given thoughtfully, can be transformative and lasting. It starts with humility: knowing what you don’t know.
A data point can often seem impersonal. But get to know the people behind it, and the picture changes entirely.
Writer Xanthe Scharff discovered that through a story that took root almost two decades ago. In 2005, Xanthe profiled a Malawian family to help readers understand what it meant to live on $1 a day – in extreme poverty. Readers’ connection and compassion were immediate – as were donations that helped Xanthe found the nonprofit Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa (AGE Africa).
On a recent return trip for another story, she reflected on the initial story’s many lessons – including the power of listening.
At the beginning, “I was so aware of what I didn’t know. It was natural for me to listen to our Malawian partners and colleagues,” Xanthe says. “Our country directors knew best how to help the girls, and I learned that I knew how to organize a U.S.-based nonprofit and unlock financial resources.”
As AGE Africa grew, she listened for what the girls were facing – and the “boundaries of help.”
“What are the situations where there isn’t really a way to help,” asks Xanthe, “and the best we can do is listen ... and support choices in agency they’re making?”
And then, she listened for when to step aside.
As Madalo Samati, who worked with Xanthe, puts it: “This is a story that oftentimes is missing in this part of the world. ... I tell [Xanthe] how she inspires me that she was able, after 10 years, to leave AGE Africa in able hands, trusting that those people will continue her vision and grow it.”
Episode transcript
Amelia Newcomb: Today’s episode of our podcast grew out of investigating one data point: What it means to live on a dollar a day. In 2005 – yes, the story behind this story starts almost 20 years ago – that was a widely used indicator of poverty. So one of our guests, writer Xanthe Scharff, helped the Monitor answer that question by putting a human face on the statistic. And the response to her 2005 story, written about a family in Malawi, was immediate and long-lasting. She recently wrote a cover story for our weekly magazine that brought us up to date.
Those bookended stories, and all that transpired in between, is what we’re going to talk about today with Xanthe and Madalo Samati, who’s joining us from Malawi.
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Newcomb: Not long after writing her dollar-a-day story, Xanthe shifted from reporting into active participation, founding the organization AGE Africa – AGE standing for “advancing girls’ education” – in Malawi, a country whose economy and life expectancy are growing, but where more than half of its 20 million people live in poverty. Madalo Samati, our other guest, knows AGE Africa well. She’s a passionate advocate for girls education and advancement, and the former executive director of the Creative Center for Community Mobilization, which is how she and Xanthe came to know each other and collaborate on building AGE Africa. Today she is senior strategic communications advisor for the USAID-funded Next Generation Activity Project, which supports a national program ensuring young students read at grade level.
Xanthe, meanwhile, is now CEO and co-founder of The Fuller Project, a global newsroom dedicated to reporting about women. For Xanthe, coming back to this story two decades later is about “honoring the reader.”
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Newcomb: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Amelia Newcomb. Welcome, Xanthe and Madalo!
Xanthe Scharff: Wonderful to be here with you, Amelia.
Madalo Samati: Thank you, Amelia.
Newcomb: It’s great to have you here. So, Xanthe, we’ll start off with you. We know what a difference a human face can make to a story, and you saw that firsthand when you wrote about the Bonefesi family’s financial struggles. So could you tell us a little bit about how Monitor readers connected to the story and what happened as a result?
Scharff: For that first story, Amelia, in 2005, my assignment was to report on the reality of a family living on a dollar a day. I focused on Selina Bonafesi. She is an entrepreneurial tobacco and corn farmer with a 14-year-old stepdaughter named Anesi. Just when I thought I’d finished reporting, my editor sent me back to her village, Bowa, to follow up. And then he sent me back again and again until we had a really rich portrayal of their life. I learned that Anesi had dropped out of eighth grade, and her older brother Silfred continued in the 11th grade.
The day after the article [was] published, Dave Scott, the beloved Monitor international editor at the time, who recently passed away, forwarded me letter after letter from readers who wanted to help Anesi. With Malawian colleagues, we returned to Bowa. We consulted village elders, and identified all six girls in the village that had made it at least to eighth grade. Dave Scott then set up a special fund for readers who wanted to send donations, and that covered the tuition for all six girls that year. I asked the women in the village what the initiative should be called, and they shouted out: “Advancing girls education in Africa,” AGE Africa. That became the name of the nonprofit that I founded. In our second year I met Madalo, her organization helped us bring more girls into the program.
To protect editorial independence, Dave Scott gave me a choice at that point. He said: “Xanthe, you can continue to be a Monitor reporter, or you can launch AGE Africa, but you can’t do both.” So I chose AGE and built the organization for 10 years. Since 2005, AGE Africa has provided 500 four-year scholarships for girls in secondary school, and now supports 52 students in universities or tertiary education of other kinds. And they have a peer mentoring program that reaches 4,500 girls directly, and 4 million through radio programming this year.
Newcomb: I love hearing about all those achievements. Telling a story like this one and building a new organization like AGE Africa gets at a key point, which is understanding the culture you’re working in, and putting a premium on values like respect and humility. And I wonder how you’ve thought about this over the years, Xanthe, in terms of knowing what you don’t know, and how that guides both good journalism and effective NGO work.
Scharff: I got lucky in a way because when I started this project, I was so aware of what I didn’t know. So over the years, it was natural for me to listen to our Malawian partners and colleagues. Our country directors knew best how to help the girls, and I learned that I knew how to organize a U.S.-based nonprofit and unlock financial resources for the girls. Today, as a CEO of a nonprofit global newsroom, I still rely on those same lessons, and it crosses directly into journalism as well, because I think the greatest journalists really revel in all the things that they don’t know.
Newcomb: That’s great to hear. And one thing that comes to mind for me is the disruption that inevitably accompanies change, and it can be both a positive and a negative. Madalo, as a development practitioner, can you share with us how you’ve seen this play out with AGE Africa?
Samati: Just this week, Pauline, one of the first group of beneficiaries for AGE Africa, coming from a very poor family, going to school without shoes, not even a notebook. When she gets to a school, she would go to the rubbish pit and get a paper, so that she can use it for writing in her classroom. Today, this girl, because of AGE Africa, she has been awarded a scholarship and a place to study critical-care nursing in one of the prestigious universities in Malawi. She texted me this week, thanking me for the continuous lifelong mentoring.
What I want to talk about here is the power of the global north and the global south partnership, and the difference it makes in a life. Not just one life, but so many lives. Because today, Pauline is supporting and mentoring so many other girls in her village. She’s continued to be in touch with the village and being an inspiration.
On the other hand, I would like to [also] talk about the negative disruption. Sometimes, without this longtime kind of mentoring, the girls lose touch with their environment, with their tradition, with their community, and [they] detach themselves. We actually go an extra mile to do more mentoring, to make the girls understand that the reason why they’ve got an education and their life has been transformed is also to connect back with their rural communities and make a difference.
Newcomb: That is remarkable impact. Hearing Pauline’s trajectory, it strikes me that it takes a lot of courage on the part of these girls to take that journey. And I just wondered how you support them in that.
Samati: I think for a local person, just like me, I’m a Malawian, I have [an] understanding of the plight that girls in Malawi go through because of the patriarchy. I was able to say: “Look at me. I’ve been through that myself, and look where I am.” It is possible to make a difference despite the patriarchy and the challenges that we go through.
Newcomb: When you mention “the patriarchy,” could you explain that a little bit more, what that looks like?
Samati: The narrative is: You aren’t smart enough to get [an] education. You aren’t smart enough to get a good job. But somebody else, a man will be a breadwinner and will take care of you.
I remember one time going to my village. We were supposed to eat a chicken that day. Our brothers had gone away, so we would’ve missed the chicken, which is the best meal. So I decided: “No, we can’t afford that.” I went and [killed] the chicken myself. You should have seen the expression on my grandmother’s face. She was shocked and she was angry with me that, as a girl, I’m not supposed to be hardhearted, to kill a chicken. But for me, I just wondered why that should be the case when we need a chicken for lunch. But this is a kind of narrative and practice that we are subjected to.
In Malawi, when girls don’t get education, they’re often victims of gender-based violence, abusive husbands. They have so many children, and they’re always in poverty. There’s always economic violence. It’s always the man having control of resources. Often, their children are not sent to school also; [they] don’t get much education because their mothers were not educated. So it’s a cycle of poverty. So the reason why over half of the population is poor is because many girls did not receive enough education.
Newcomb: Looking at everything that’s happened in the past couple of decades, that’s what brought you back to Malawi, Xanthe, and prompted you to reach out to the Monitor about doing a story. Why did going back matter? What did you learn as you took that journey?
Scharff: We started the story in 2005. We learned about educational challenges and other things that were happening, like drought in the village and cultural expectations that the girls were facing. But there was just so much more that I wanted to know about their stories.
For this follow up story, what I learned from talking to the girls, who are now women and mothers and professionals, is two things: One, that opening a door to education and pursuing that education creates incredible opportunities, but it’s not without loss. Like Madalo said, it’s hard to keep that connection to all of the facets of life in the village. And each of the women who I interviewed for the piece, they experienced this pull between the life that education might offer and the life that’s being offered in the village. The other thing that we learned was about the boundaries of help. What kind of help is actually helpful? What are the situations where there isn’t really a way to help, and the best we can do is listen, understand, and support choices in agency that they’re making.
It really hit home for me when I wrote to Dave Scott about doing a follow-up story in Malawi. I learned that he’d passed away. And I felt a profound sense of sadness at not having had the chance to tell him that Anesi’s story and my work with the Monitor changed my life. It put me on a decades-long path of working for women and girls. We really owe it to the people who trust us with their stories and we owe it to ourselves to follow up and to keep learning.
Newcomb: Speaking of going back, it obviously means that you left the organization. And one thing I’ve heard both of you say is that it was important for Xanthe to leave the organization she founded. So Madalo and then Xanthe, can you elaborate on that?
Samati: I think this is a story that oftentimes is missing in this part of the world, where our founders would keep on and actually at the end of the day mess up, because they continue to micromanage, and so on and so forth. But I think for AGE Africa, every time I meet Xanthe, I tell her how she inspires me that she was able, after 10 years, to leave AGE Africa in able hands, trusting that those people will continue her vision and grow it.
Scharff: Thank you, Madalo. I had a conversation about this with Lessenia Chikho, the brilliant graduate of AGE Africa who is now an employee of AGE Africa working to expand the project in the central region of Malawi. And she said, “I was so happy to meet you, but I just don’t understand how you could leave the organization and you didn’t even stay on the board.” And so I got the chance to share back with her that it felt important to just give everyone else the space to do the work in their own way. But coming back to Malawi and spending time with you, Madalo, and hearing the updates on Pauline’s life, it does feel like leaving but not leaving. When we’re working towards the same goal, or working for women and girls, we’re going to find each other again and again. And I look forward to finding Lessenia again as well along her journey.
Newcomb: Well, it’s a great explanation how you leave something, but you never do leave it. Xanthe and Madalo, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and perspectives with us today.
Samati: Thank you, Amelia.
Scharff: Thank you.
Newcomb: And to our listeners, thank you for listening. You can find show notes with a link to the story we discussed at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Amelia Newcomb, and edited and produced by Jingnan Peng and Clay Collins. Our sound engineers were Alyssa Britton and Tim Malone, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
