0.2 Part two: special topics  (Page 22/39)

Overview

For millions of women around the globe, lack of education is a handicap for which they pay a heavy price. Some 565 millionwomen are illiterate, mainly in poor rural areas. These women cannot sign their names, decipher simple instructions, or fill out an applicationform. Their lack of education limits their ability to earn money and get credit, to participate in decision-making in their families andcommunities, to delay childbearing, and to offer their children the best life chances.

The failure to educate these women when they were girls is the result of a range of factors, including the need for girls' labor in thehome, attitudes that devalue education for girls, fears about girls' security outside the home, and lack of resources to pay for education.

Girls' Education is a central agent of hope. The research shows us, in the end, how powerfully we can connect education withhuman welfare. Educating girls offers a multitude of benefits for the girls (themselves), their current and future families, and their societies. Weascribe to the cornerstone of international development: go women, go water, go local. Women come first.

This module will introduce you to educational trends and benefits of educating girls, and give you resources to deepen your studyso that in the end you may connect your learning with a community need.

Trends and effects in girls' education

• Two-thirds of the world's 876 million illiterates are women, and the number of illiterates is not expected to decrease significantly in thenext twenty years. (UN, The World's Women 2000, Trends and Statistics, 2000)
• There are some 700 million children between 6 and 11 years old. More than 110 million of them are not in school, and some two-thirds of thosechildren are girls." (Carol Bellamy, UNICEF, 9/7/2000)
• By age 18, girls have received - on average, 4.4 years less education that boys. (UNICEF, Educating Girls, Transforming the Future, Mar 2000)
• Babies born to mothers without formal education are twice as likely to die before age five. (UNICEF, The World's Finance Ministers Must Act Now in Fight Against Poverty: UNICEF Says Investment in Girls'Education is the Key, 02/26/2001)
• The same babies are four times more likely to be malnourished. (UNICEF, The World's Finance Ministers Must Act Now in Fight AgainstPoverty: UNICEF Says Investment in Girls' Education is the Key, 02/26/2001)
• As female literacy rates increase, infant mortality rates decrease. (UNICEF, Benefits of Girls Education, 2001)
• Uneducated women are more vulnerable to HIV. (UNICEF, The World's Finance Ministers Must Act Now in Fight Against Poverty: UNICEF Says Investment in Girls'Education is the Key, 02/26/2001)

Go women

"In study after study - by the UN, the World Bank, by academics the world over - girls' education emerges as the single bestinvestment that any society can make."

- Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (in a speech given to the Millennium Assembly Forum onGirls' Education, Sept 7, 2000)