Educating Women Brings Progress for Everyone: International Women's Day 2014
By: GCE
Educating girls and women means progress - not only progress towards gender parity and equality in education (one of the six Education for All goals) and not only progress to fulfilling the right to education (a universal human right) but progress in changing the world we live in, creating increased tolerance, prosperity and health benefits for communities globally. As the UN, governments and civil society mark 2014 International Women’s Day on Saturday 8 March, we must learn the lessons that the continued exclusion of girls and women from education limits the progress towards equitable and sustainable development.
Girls and women must be afforded their fundamental rights – including their right to education - regardless of where they live or their socio-economic status, racial, ethnic, linguistic or and or cultural heritage.
Education empowers women:
If all women completed primary education, there would be 66% fewer maternal deaths, saving 189,000 lives per year.
In Pakistan, working women with good literacy skills earned 95% more than women with weak literacy skills
One additional year of schooling for women can increase their earnings by up to 20%.
Educating women transforms communities:
Educating girls can save millions of lives 2.1 million children under 5 were saved between 1990 and 2009 because of improvements in girls’ education.
In low and lower middle income countries, providing all women with a primary education would reduce stunting – a robust indicator of malnutrition – by 4%, or 1.7 million children; providing a secondary education would reduce stunting by 26%, or 11.9 million children.
Household survey data suggests that for each additional year of the mother’s education, the average child attains an extra 0.32 years, and for girls the benefit is slightly larger.
In the week following International Women’s Day, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will be held in New York: among other indicators, they will note that important progress has been made on getting girls into school, yet girls still account for 54% of all children out of school and, based on recent trends, it is estimated that “girls from the poorest families in sub-Saharan Africa are only expected to achieve lower secondary completion in 2111”. This is unacceptable. The CSW and other international discussions underway on the future of the world’s sustainable development (notably the Open Working Group on SDGs) must call for immediate and sustained efforts to give every girl their right to education and end unacceptably high levels of women’s illiteracy worldwide – women account for almost two-thirds of the 774 million illiterate adults world wide.
Quality education can deliver remarkable change to the lives of girls and women across the world, as well as to their families, their communities and their countries. Governments and the international community have an opportunity to place girls’ education at the heart of the post-2015 development framework; not doing so will severely limit global progress towards sustainable development in future years. Equality for women is progress for all, and Education for All is a key driver towards progress for women and their communities.
For more information on what's happening this International Women's Day in countries around the world, visit the official site: www.internationalwomensday.com