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Summer 2010All Consuming

Girl Empower

Growing evidence indicates that boosting the status of girls benefits not only individuals, but also communities, countries—and the world.

By Emily Sohn

Anita grew up in Bihar, India—a country where 57 percent of girls drop out of school between the ages of 6 and 16, and only 14 percent of young women between 15 and 24 have jobs. From an early age, Anita wanted more. At 5, she begged her parents to let her go to school. At 10, she started tutoring other kids for money. By 20, she had become a beekeeper, hired her brother and trained 20 other girls in her trade, and was earning enough to pay for college.

Anita is just one girl in one country, but her story is symbolic of something much bigger: Helping girls helps the whole world. If every girl living in the developing world were given an education, a voice and a chance, according to a growing body of evidence, there would be less disease, less poverty, less pressure on the environment from overpopulation and fewer deaths at tragically young ages.

This idea—that girls are a key part of solutions to economic and social problems—has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Now, it’s going mainstream. U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has made girls and women a focus of her foreign policy efforts. More than a hundred world leaders attended a workshop about girls during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. And aid organizations are increasingly directing their efforts toward girls. The Nike Foundation, which has funded girl-focused projects since 2004, has even given the movement a name: “The Girl Effect.”

“We have increasing amounts of data to show that if we create more of an enabling environment for girls, we really can help to change their situation, and that’s where you start to see the ripple effects—how that helps households, communities and countries,” says gender expert Sarah Degnan Kambou, interim president of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C. “Girls hold up half the sky.”

There are more than 600 million adolescent girls ages 12–18 living in developing countries, according to statistics compiled by the Nike Foundation. Of those, one in seven marries before age 15, and 38 percent become wives before age 18. Marriage often leads to motherhood, and both transitions inhibit adolescents from getting an education: Girls make up 70 percent of the globe’s 130 million kids who aren’t in school.

Just a penny out of every aid dollar goes to adolescent girls, says Michelle Chaplin, a New York–based program manager for BRAC, an international humanitarian and development organization. “They’re generally one of, if not the most vulnerable groups when it comes to developing countries,” Chaplin says, adding that it’s normal for 12-year-old girls to get pregnant in some cultures. “They’re sort of set up to repeat the same vicious cycle that their mothers went through.”

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Missing Sisters

Tens of millions of girls are missing from countries where men are more valued than women. New policies and cultural norms aim to stop the practice of killing daughters before they are born. Read the related article by Emily Sohn.

Summer 2010

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