GIVING GLOBALLY

Education: It’s Not Just About the Boys. Get Girls Into School.

 
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Who wants more poor children around the world to go to school? Raise your hand. Yep, everyone's hand is up. Education is the ultimate mom-and-apple-pie (or rice-and-beans) issue. Everyone's for it. But our best efforts to get more impoverished kids into schools aren't always effective. Despite some recent progress in China and India, 73 million children worldwide don't go to primary school. Three times as many never go to secondary school. Though they can sometimes be trained later in life, their shortened time in school is often a major impediment to advancement. These kids are mostly doomed to a life of poverty, and so are their families.

The way out is not just to champion education generally but to focus intently on one subset of the problem: girls, who make up nearly 60 percent of the kids out of school. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, only one in five girls gets any education at all. Here's where to zero in on the challenge: most of the benefits that accompany increased education are attributable to girls, who use their schooling more productively than boys. Women in the developing world who have had some education share their earnings; men keep a third to a half for themselves.

"The reason so many experts believe educating girls is the most important investment in the world is how much they give back to their families," says Gene Sperling, a former top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton (and currently advising Barack Obama). Sperling's book, "What Works in Girls' Education" (with Barbara Herz), is simultaneously disturbing and encouraging. It's disheartening to think of how far we have to go to get all kids into school—one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals launched in 2000 to accelerate progress on fighting poverty, disease and other social ills. But it's also hopeful: at least we can focus on a specific solution.

When girls go to school, they marry later and have fewer, healthier children. For instance, if an African mother has five years of education, her child has a 40 percent better chance of living to age 5. A World Health Organization study in Burkina Faso showed that mothers with some education were 40 percent less likely to subject their children to the practice of genital mutilation. When girls get educated, they are three times less likely to contract HIV/AIDS.

Unfortunately, many African parents still don't know that their own lives can be greatly improved if their daughters go to school. They're often uncomfortable when their girls have to travel long distances to school (making them more subject to sexual predators). Girls themselves grow uncomfortable in school when they have no separate latrines. They fear being spied on by boys; their parents agree and withdraw them. This is the kind of everyday impediment to progress that aid organizers notice on the ground but rarely becomes part of the debate.

The biggest barrier to primary and secondary education in the developing world remains the fees that too many countries continue to charge parents for each child in school. Sometimes it's a flat fee; sometimes it's barely disguised as a fee for books or school uniforms. The practical effect is that poor families (disproportionately in rural areas, where school attendance is lightest) send their two oldest, healthiest boys to school with the hope that they will support their parents in their old age. This often deprives girls—the ones actually much more likely to help their families—of the chance to go to school.

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: africaid @ 12/28/2008 10:54:56 PM

    Thank you for this excellent article, Mr. Alter. I appreciate the effective way in which you???ve summarized the benefits of providing education for girls in the developing world. I work with a non profit organization, AfricAid (www.africaid.com) that does just this: provides primary- and secondary-level education to girls in Africa. We have been supporting Tanzanian girls, specifically, in their educational goals for the past seven years, and we have learned many lessons in the process. Most importantly, we have learned that just getting girls in the classroom is not enough in and of itself to create meaningful opportunities for change. These girls must have access to a high-quality education in order to capitalize on their educational opportunity. This involves ??? as you indicated ??? ensuring that adequately-trained teachers are in the classroom, that these girls have access to learning materials such as textbooks and basic supplies, and that their school experience is tangibly connected with the realities of their political, cultural and economic environments. This means, on one hand, tailoring cookie-cutter models of education to local cultural landscapes in order to help parents understand why schooling might be relevant to their daughters, and what the benefits of education will be for them, individually, and as members of a larger community. It also means ensuring that these young women are equipped while in school with the vocational tools and leadership skills that will open up professional opportunities where they have none today, or enable them to become leaders and role models for others in their home communities. This is exactly what we at AfricAid are working to do.

  • Posted By: jennifer.a.mann @ 10/10/2008 5:17:59 PM

    Jonathan, very informative article. Thank you for writing this. It's been a challenge to explain how important education is in that area, because so many of us in America have a taken-for-granted view of education. I work for an Ethiopian non-profit organization called the Children of Ethiopia Education Fund. The mission is simple and will remain so. COEEF provides a quality private education for mainly females in Ethiopia and other East African countries through a network of sponsors in America and other developed countries. The base sponsorship is $225/year, which covers school fees, uniforms, textbooks and other school supplies. This is under $20/month, but people may not realize just how far that money is going. I get to see firsthand the effects of the donated money as I go over to Ethiopia twice a year to visit students and our partner schools. It's really amazing what it does socially, collectively for their families and mentally for each student. I have plenty of stories I could tell you about how mothers will start to value their daughters once they are being education through our program. The quality of life rises and we are now starting to see some of our students graduate 12th grade in the program. We are really excited to see what starts to happen after a year or two as we know this is going to have a dramatic impact in the country. It's simple, you can't go over and Americanize Ethiopia, you have to empower the children and mainly females, to make a difference in their country. www.coeef.org.

  • Posted By: mattie against MSM bias @ 09/26/2008 10:12:53 PM

    KELLYB are still out there? We've been looking for you. No way we can keep up with McCain. We're still working on Obama. Please come help us. We sent you an invite but are now public.

    http://citizensagainstproobamamediabias.blogspot.com/

    Hope to see you soon - at least to take the poll. Or if you've set up your own blog - let us know.

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