ACED

ACED Core Values

We have recognized the need to strengthen the bond of common understanding which unites us together as a ministering agency. We have identified certain key values or fundamental principles that determine our actions.

These values are designed from our experience and they express the ethos of AFRICAN CENTRE FOR EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT as we understand it and the essential character to which we yet aspire as an organization. We therefore express them in the present tense not because we have attained them but so that we may hold them alongside our activities as a constant challenge.

WE ARE COMMITTED TO RURAL PEOPLE: We are called specifically to serve the rural people of Africa. We regard all people as created and loved by God. We regard their lives above money, structure, systems and other institutional machinery. We act in ways that demonstrate the dignity, uniqueness and intrinsic worth of the rural people. We also recognize the diversities of human personality, culture and contribution. We are poised to guide, salvage and promote their welfare through education and systematic development policy.

We equally stand in solidarity in a common search for justice. We seek to understand the vulnerability of rural people to global annihilation through economic experiments , industrial pollution, environmental degradation, natural disaster, violence, war, poverty and disease.

We also aspire to facilitate an engagement between the rural dwellers and their more privileged urban counterparts and, by so doing, to open to both a path to transformation. We believe that the rural people are people from whom others may learn and receive and that they have potentials to contribute to social development. The need for transformation is common to all. Together, we share a quest for awareness, responsibility, reconciliation and healing in a broken continent.

WE ARE SERVANTS: The resources at our disposal are not our own. They are a sacred trust from God. We strive to ensure that resources are allocated for the purpose for which they are meant. We speak and act honestly and attempt to convey a public image conforming to reality. We demand of ourselves high standards of professional competence and accept the need to be accountable through appropriate structures for achieving these standards. We share our experience and knowledge with others where it can assist them. We are servants of God’s creation. We care for the rural people of Africa and we act in ways that will protect them.

WE ARE PARTNERS: We maintain a collaborative posture and are always open towards other non-government organizations involved in education and rural development. We are willing to receive and consider honest opinions from others about our work.

WE ARE RESPONSIVE: We are responsive to the threat of ignorance, illiteracy and underdevelopment facing our rural communities. We therefore feel that our involvement in assisting these people is worthwhile. We recognize that our rural people have a contribution to make, even from their own experience of abandonment, marginalization, exploitation and abuse. We are responsive to new and unusual developments. We encourage innovation, creativity, reflection and discovery in order to grow in understanding and skill.

Finally, we recognize that values cannot be legislated; they must be lived. No document can substitute for the attitudes, decisions and actions that make up the fabric of our life and work. We therefore pledge to uphold these core values, to honour them in our decisions, to express them in our relationships and to act consistently with them wherever AFRICAN CENTRE FOR EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT is called to duty.