Community Leadership Education Fund

Community Leadership Education Fund (CLEF) is an initiative of the Africa foundation founded in 1996 to provide financial support to potential rural youth. CLEF programme operates in South Africa where it started it operation, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya.

Purpose

CLEF's goal is to help young people who have shown promise for leadership obtain knowledge and skills that they would not otherwise be able to. CLEF's specific objectives are to enhance household incomes, lower unemployment rates, increase access to postsecondary education, and, in the end, improve communities.

History

With the effort of the Africa foundation to conserve wild life there came the need to use education as a tool to accomplish to that vision. Africa Foundation launched the CLEF scholarship programme in 1995 in South Africa, offering partial funding to students from identified rural communities surrounding conservation areas. It offered bursaries to students around in the Maputaland and Greater Kruger regions in South Africa and also extended the same opportunities to Tanzania and Kenya in 2014, Botswana and Namibia in 2018 with the goal of unearthing educational potentials in such areas. CLEF aims to break the cycle of poverty in rural Africa through access to tertiary level education. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 is the core focus of the programme.

Operation

Community Leadership Education Fund focuses not only on communities around wild life conservation zones but partnered other selected communities where poverty is widespread, and young people with potential faces higher tendencies to be excluded from education and the other opportunities it offers.

CLEF bursary provides a partial funding towards the students financial need and gives further financial advice. Recipient are allowed to choose the field of study as well as their institution of choice. Support is given for only a year of study and then students reapply the following years and based on their application to their studies support granted.

Countries/places of operation

• Botswana
• Kenya
• Mozambique
• Namibia
• South Africa-Greater Kruger
• South Africa-Maputuland
• Tanzania – Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro Crater
• Tanzania – Serengeti
• Zanzibar