“First, I think girls’ education may be the single most cost-effective kind of aid work. It’s cheap, it opens minds, it gives girls new career opportunities and ways to generate cash, it leads them to have fewer children and invest more in those children, and it tends to bring women from the shadows into the formal economy and society.”
- Nicholas Kristof, Pultizer-Prize winning humanitarian journalist of The New York Times and co-author of Half the Sky
What about the boys? People ask us all the time why our campaign focuses only on girls.
While there are many equally deserving boys around the world in dire need of an education, we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on girls, since statistically, they’ve faced greater disadvantages. One in four girls in the developing world is not in school. Of the 130 million youth who are out of school in the world, 70% are girls, presenting a crippling gender gap. Yet, less than two cents of every development dollar goes to girls.
Educating girls isn’t just about equality – it’s about the economy. Research consistently shows that educating girls and enabling their participation in the workforce substantially increases a country’s GDP, or economic output. Women invest 90% of their income back into the household (the average for men is 30-40%). An extra year of primary school increases girls’ wages by 10% to 20%. An extra year of secondary school increases them by 15% to 25%.
Plus, there is a positive connection between educating girls and lowering maternal mortality rates, delaying childbirth and family size, and improving hygiene to slow the spread of disease. Girls who stay in school for seven or more years are seen to marry four years later and have two fewer children than girls who drop out. This saves lives, because when uneducated girls are married off (1 in 7 are wed before age 15 in the developing world), they quickly get pregnant and suffer complications or death from pregnancy (the leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is pregnancy).
We can transform a girl’s life if we help her be the first to reach her high school graduation, and then hopefully college. For further information, try our recommended reads below, and join us in turning these harrowing statistics into future success stories.
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