There’s Nothing A Girl Can’t Do

First and foremost, depriving girls of their education, just because they are girls, is a human-rights violation, with lasting consequences. As the now famous saying goes, “Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” Systemic gender inequity is keeping millions of girls around the world from the educations they seek and deserve. We owe it to these girls to break down those barriers and create robust educational opportunities for the ones facing the greatest challenges. 

The most common gender-based barriers are:

• Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or cutting
• Child marriage, often forced
• Endemic sexual violence: be it at home, while walking for chores or to school — or in school itself
• Home labor discrimination: girls are more often tasked with the time-consuming tasks of the household: fetching cooking wood and water, caring for younger siblings, working in the garden
• A lack of sanitation facilities and/or products for menstruation management
• Pregnancy: though Tanzania no longer bars pregnant girls and young mothers from ever returning to school, there are still cultural barriers
• A cultural bias toward male value and power

Educating a girl is like dropping a large pebble into still water; the ripple effects are broad and deep and just beginning to be truly understood. We are learning, for example, that a girl who gets a quality education will benefit from improved overall health, which helps ensure a brighter future for her, her family, and the community in which she lives. 

By providing quality, safe education to girls, we are helping to break the cycle of generational poverty. For these girls, data is indicating that more years in school results in:

• Lower infant and maternal mortality rates
• A decreased risk of HIV/AIDS and other diseases
• An increased probability of her future children attending school and receiving improved healthcare, and
• Higher lifetime incomes that are invested back into the family and community.

According to a recent brief by the Global Partnership for Education, “The economic costs of not educating girls are considerable. A recent World Bank report showed that limited educational opportunities for girls and barriers to completing 12 years of education are costing countries between $15 trillion and $30 trillion in lost lifetime productivity and earnings.” The economic impact on families and communities from not educating girls is devastating to the global economy.

Barriers to global girls education are common in communities around the world. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, with a target deadline of 2030. They are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity.

Many of the SDGs intersect and come into play when we talk about girls’ education, such as gender equality, reducing inequality, ensuring quality education, eliminating poverty, supporting good health and well-being, and more. GEC focuses specifically on two SDGs: #4, “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all,” and #5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.”   

According to the United Nations Girls Education Initiative, “the Sustainable Development Goals are said to be interconnected — often the key to success for achieving one SDG will involve tackling issues associated with another. Educating girls and promoting gender equality are key for the world to deliver on all the SDGs.” 

By holding our global partners accountable to these agreed upon goals and working together to achieve them, we should see more girls receiving a high quality education around the world.

Growing evidence points to how girls’ education may be one of our most important, but overlooked, tools in fighting the growing pace of climate change, both in terms of curbing population growth and increasing resiliency in women and girls.

In 2017, a coalition of researchers, scientists, business leaders, and policymakers created Project Drawdown, an initiative that identified the most likely methods actually “drawing down” (creating an annual decline) the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The team ranked 100 solutions for reversing global warming. Girls’ education was #6 on that list out of 100, showing the extreme importance of education equality on the effect of climate change.

Women With More Education Have Fewer Children, Thereby Lessening the Impact of Population Growth on Climate Change

“Education lays a foundation for vibrant lives for girls and women, their families, and their communities. It also is one of the most powerful levers available for avoiding emissions by curbing population growth,” states the report from Project Drawdown. “Women with more years of education have fewer and healthier children.”

This 2016 report from the Brookings Institute also specifically highlighted the fact that women with more education have fewer children, especially in developing countries where often the fertility rates are rising as the mortality rates are decreasing. “The cheapest, most cost-effective mechanism for reducing emissions… is education, or more specifically girls’ education, that is far more likely to result in lower carbon emissions than a shift to renewables, improved agricultural practices, urban public transport, or any other strategy now being contemplated.”

Resiliency in the Face of Climate Change

Project Drawdown also cited the importance of equipping women and girls with resiliency. “Education shores up resilience and equips girls and women to face the impacts of climate change. They can be more effective stewards of food, soil, trees, and water, even as nature’s cycle changes. They have greater capacity to cope with shocks from natural disasters and extreme weather events.”

In 2017, the Brookings Institution released a report that showed that developing countries were far more impacted by natural disasters caused by climate change. According to the report, “Climate change increases humanity’s vulnerability to the shocks of weather-related disasters; it also exacerbates existing gender inequalities that obstruct opportunities for girls’ and women’s social and economic empowerment.”