International Day of the Girl
It’s simple: In the world’s poorest communities, girls and women bear the brunt of poverty. Fighting poverty in those communities requires focusing on girls and women to achieve equality. When families struggle to grow enough food to eat, or earn enough money to send all their kids to school, it’s the girls who are often the last to eat and first to be kept home from school. In these same communities, it’s the women who are frequently denied the right to own the land they’ve farmed their entire lives. And where girls and women are denied freedom to leave their homes or walk down a street, they struggle to earn a living, attend school or even visit a doctor. But girls and women aren’t just the faces of the poverty; they’re also the key to overcoming it. CARE’s nearly seven decades of experience makes clear that when you empower a girl or a woman, she becomes a catalyst for positive change whose success benefits everyone around her.
Barriers to girls’ education are:
EARLY MARRIAGE
Girls are entering into early marriages at an alarming rate. They are often married early to alleviate their family’s financial burden, far before they are ready for marriage physically and mentally.
LOWER SOCIAL STATUS
Because girls generally have a lower social status than their brothers, their education is valued less. When resources are scarce, and there are both real and opportunity costs associated with going to school, many families opt to educate their boys over their girls. Additionally, classroom teachers, materials, and methodologies are often skewed to favor boys.
SCHOOL SAFETY
School safety remains a critical barrier for girls to attend school. If the journey to school and the school environment are not safe, parents will not enroll their daughters, and girls will not attend.
SANITATION
Having access to basic clean water and a decent toilet saves children’s lives, gives women an advantage in earning money and ensures a good food supply. Improved sanitation can keep a girl in school by making facilities available to her when she reaches puberty.
HUNGER
Malnutrition affects every stage of life and has severe consequences that can impact generations. Children born to malnourished mothers are at increased risk for disease and death. Chronically malnourished children face lifelong consequences in reduced mental capacity, lower retention in school and reduced lifetime earnings.
CONFLICT
Education can be a life-saving resource that reestablishes a vulnerable child’s sense of normalcy and builds self-esteem and hope for the future. Many experts consider education an essential humanitarian response to complex emergencies, closely following food, water and shelter.
Learn more about care.org
