October 10, 2015 was the International Day of the Girl. Several students from Emory MDP chose to spend the day celebrating girls with the CARE Walk for Lasting Change in Atlanta.
Why did we choose celebrate girls?
According to Care, it’s “because women produce half the world’s food, put in two-thirds of the world’s working hours, and yet make only 10 percent of the world’s income. That’s not just disheartening, it’s unjust. We fight for gender equality, because righting this imbalance is key to fighting global poverty.”
It’s proven that by sending a girl to school, you can raise her family’s income by about 20% per year. This means you can move her family out of poverty. By educating all the girls in one village, we can move that entire village out of poverty. We recently learned about girl’s education around the world and the awful number of girls without education through the #60MillionGirls campaign. It’s true, 60 million girls don’t have a write to an education.
Unfortunately, the reality is that millions of girls are lacking more than just their right to an education. Millions of girls lack the right to decide when they get married, the right to reproductive health education, the right to basic necessities such as clean water and a healthy diet, as well as many other rights. Girls will walk miles each way to get to school. Yet, school is exactly what can change their reality. An educated girl can be a girl with more rights. A girl who is empowered to change the future of her country. Girls around the world face many challenges that keep them from school, though. The dropout rate for girls is too high, even here in America. In third world countries, girls often drop out of school because they miss too many days due to menstruation cycles or poor health, the family needs them to fetch water and work around the house, the family needs them to get a job and earn money, or they get married at too young of an age.
That is why we walked in Atlanta on October 10th. That is why we celebrated International Day of the Girl. Because millions of girls lack their basic rights and deserve to be empowered through an education. We celebrated this day so that we can start to work towards making it more possible for girls to get the education that will lead to change.
To learn more about CARE and the work they do visit: http://www.care.org/.
Why did we choose celebrate girls?
According to Care, it’s “because women produce half the world’s food, put in two-thirds of the world’s working hours, and yet make only 10 percent of the world’s income. That’s not just disheartening, it’s unjust. We fight for gender equality, because righting this imbalance is key to fighting global poverty.”
It’s proven that by sending a girl to school, you can raise her family’s income by about 20% per year. This means you can move her family out of poverty. By educating all the girls in one village, we can move that entire village out of poverty. We recently learned about girl’s education around the world and the awful number of girls without education through the #60MillionGirls campaign. It’s true, 60 million girls don’t have a write to an education.
Unfortunately, the reality is that millions of girls are lacking more than just their right to an education. Millions of girls lack the right to decide when they get married, the right to reproductive health education, the right to basic necessities such as clean water and a healthy diet, as well as many other rights. Girls will walk miles each way to get to school. Yet, school is exactly what can change their reality. An educated girl can be a girl with more rights. A girl who is empowered to change the future of her country. Girls around the world face many challenges that keep them from school, though. The dropout rate for girls is too high, even here in America. In third world countries, girls often drop out of school because they miss too many days due to menstruation cycles or poor health, the family needs them to fetch water and work around the house, the family needs them to get a job and earn money, or they get married at too young of an age.
That is why we walked in Atlanta on October 10th. That is why we celebrated International Day of the Girl. Because millions of girls lack their basic rights and deserve to be empowered through an education. We celebrated this day so that we can start to work towards making it more possible for girls to get the education that will lead to change.
To learn more about CARE and the work they do visit: http://www.care.org/.