Today, we are celebrating Stanley Ndambakuwa's 29th birthday. On 25 June 2013, Stanley founded the African Community Fund for Education Group. He was a foreign student in South Africa, and had spent three years working as a student assistant, and leading a student organization to promote recycling activities around the campus. He worked with churches to promote faith, and encourage young people to live according to societal norms and values. Stanley also took additional responsibilities as a mentor to fellow students who needed help through the Monash University's Residential Mentorship Program.
For five years, he worked faithfully on a long and painful path to raise the ACFE Group, but he kept on believing that it could be one hope for a few young people in Africa and around the world whose lives would be changed. In 2014, the ACFE Group began a new work in Zimbabwe, and in 2017 spread its arms into Canada. In 2015, the ACFE Group launched the global Educate the Girl Child Campaign which aims to create awareness and responsibility for an inclusive and sustainable education of girls. In South Africa, we unveiled a leadership program that is changing the lives of young girls by preparing them for future leadership roles through entrepreneurship training, mentorship, coaching, and emotional development. This year, in Chicago we are introducing a new partnership program that will bring leaders from around the world to Chicago to have a dialogue and conversation on the importance of educating girls.
Stanley joined the Obama Foundation Scholars Program in 2018, and the ACFE Group is expanding its fundraising and strategic partnerships commitment into North America and Europe. We worked with partners from Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States over the past years to get the work done, and the new partnerships we have are taking our work to the next level.
These developments and more started on little piece of paper, with a $20 saving from a student's stipend, and vision bigger than himself. At 29 years, Stanley says, "things will only get better and this is the beginning."
