* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
At the end of the last millennium, more than 100 million children worldwide were left out of the education system due to conflict, poverty, natural disasters, discrimination, lack of nearby schools, among other reasons. Two thirds of these children were girls.
Such shocking figures mobilized the international community to launch the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) in 2000, a partnership committed to narrowing the gender gap in primary and secondary education. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is the lead agency of UNGEI. Working on the ground globally, UNGEI together with governments, civil society, the private sector, communities and families help girls to empower themselves by building social support networks that can help them to stay in school and succeed. While UNGEI’s main goal to ensure access to free, quality education for each girl and boy by 2015 remains a challenge, the partnership has witnessed some remarkable achievements.
Today, the number of children out of school has dropped to 67 million and girls’ enrollment has increased significantly. Gender parity in primary enrolment has improved significantly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, regions that started the decade with the greatest gender gaps. But still more than half of children of primary-school age out of school are girls and 59 per cent of them live in South Asia.
While acknowledging the progress made, I think it is imperative to move beyond the numbers, to analyse the situations of girls in relation to wealth and other disparities, and look closely at what are the barriers to girls going to school, and what it takes for a girl in a developing country to go to school, what it means to provide a quality education for a girl, what it means for a country to have educated women.
To Educate a Girl, a documentary supported by UNICEF and UNGEI, offers a close encounter with young girls who are fighting against all odds to get into school and stay there.
Through the lens of filmmakers Frederick Rendina and Oren Rudavsky, we meet Manisha, a teenager from Nepal who works in the fields while her three younger siblings go to school. Manisha is not alone. We know that child labuor is robbing many children of an education. An estimated 150 million children between 5-14 years or one in six children in the world – are engaged in child labour[1].
In Uganda, we meet Mercy. Only six years old, Mercy is embarking on her first year of school. Her single mother is battling poverty to send her daughter to school and provide her with the opportunity for a better future.
The film features communities that are working to fight poverty, hunger, disease, climate change and conflict. In southern Nepal, young men and women volunteer their time to go door to door encouraging families to send their daughters and sons to school. In northern Uganda, a “back to school” march brings an entire community together, providing a stirring picture of grassroots efforts to help girls get a quality education.
Development partners together with governments across the globe are working to make girls’ education a priority and ensure that girls enroll and stay in school. Elimination of school fees, gender-sensitive schools, and increased recruitment of qualified female teachers are some of the ways in which to achieve this end.
Educating girls is not just the right thing to do. It is also an investment in our collective future. Communities and governments are recognizing that educating girls is the first step towards progress. Girls equipped with a quality education are more empowered and better prepared to protect themselves against violence and exploitation. They can make educated choices about their lives, and are less vulnerable to disease, including HIV and AIDS. Every year of schooling increases a girl’s earning power by 10 to 20 per cent, and the return on secondary education is even higher – 15 to 25 per cent. We also know that a child born to an educated mother is two times more likely to survive to the age of five. An education enables girls and women to break the bonds of poverty too often passed down through generations.
With only four years remaining to meet the Millennium Development Goals, the stakes are high. Only one out of three countries has reached parity in both primary and secondary education, and where parity has been reached the challenge still remains to keep girls in school and learning. If we do not meet the goals, the cost of failure will most likely be disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest and most vulnerable girls and women. We have the opportunity to act now. Together and in partnership our efforts can be optimized to effect a positive change in the lives of millions of children.
[1] Diallo, Yacouba, et al., Global Child Labour Developments: Measuring trends from 2004 to 2008, International Labour Organization, Geneva, 2010.
About the author:
Susan Durston is Associate Director, Education Programmes and Global Chief of Education for UNICEF, which she came to from UNICEF's Regional Office for South Asia where she was Regional Advisor for Education.
She has spent much of her long career in the field, in the South Pacific, Africa and South Asia, working for DFID, the European Commission and UNICEF as well as hands on education work in planning, and teacher training in various contexts. Her work has included time in the health sector and also teaching in the University of Leeds, UK.
Susan's professional interest is equity and inclusion in education as well as the broader development context, and she led an agenda which included several research initiatives in education in South Asia related to this. A national of the U.K. (Wales) she is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities in the U.K
