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Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8813454/Teaching-girls-in-the-developing-world.html#disqus_thread
8:45PM BST 07 Oct 2011
Teaching girls in the developing world
Even a small investment in education in the poorest countries makes a huge difference.
In the West, they are often a byword for trouble – but they may well be the world’s best hope of tackling hunger and population growth. Yes, strange as it may seem, teenage girls could, as the UN has put it, “hold the key to breaking the cycle of poverty” in which so much of humanity is caught.
Admittedly, these potential saviours are not unruly British adolescents but the 283 million girls aged between 10 and 20 who live in poverty in the countryside of the developing world. Study after study has shown that when they are given a better chance – above all, a decent education – something miraculous happens: the number of births in the area falls, while income and food production increase. Yet these same teenagers have long been neglected by their families and aid agencies alike, with the result that their adolescence usually sees their horizons not widening, but shrinking.
In the rural areas of the Third World, women hold up much more than half the sky. Not only do they keep house and cook – as well as spending hours every day fetching water for the family and wood for fuel – but they do almost us much of the farm work as men.Unsurprisingly, their working days are much longer.
As if collecting wood and water and working in the fields wasn’t enough, these adolescent girls also prepare food, look after younger children, tend vegetable patches and care for livestock. But, as a new report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs points out, their real importance lies not in what they do, but in what they could become.
“Children in their second decade of life brim with potential and ingenuity to change what has come before,” says the report, which was guided by an advisory group chaired by Catherine Bertini, a member of the Reagan administration who went on to run the World Food Programme, and included Clare Short, the former international development secretary. “Their capacity to learn is at its peak, and they are more likely to be innovative and entrepreneurial than older adults.” Given the right opportunities, these hard-working teenagers “have the potential to generate growth as entrepreneurs and workers in all sectors of the economy”.
Here, education makes a huge difference. Spending just an extra year at school often boosts girls’ future income by 10 to 20 per cent. The productivity benefits of that added 12 months would, one study concluded, increase the Kenyan maize harvest by almost a quarter. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that if women farmers were given the same education and access to resources as men, the number of malnourished people could be cut by 120 million worldwide. And nothing, experts agree, brings down population growth rates faster.
As the new report points out, “educated, healthy, and civically empowered women raise educated, healthy and civically empowered children”. Yet at present, instead of proving to be the time in a girl’s life “when the cycle of poverty and disadvantage can be broken”, adolescence usually “dramatically alters her life path for the worse” so that it “leads back to a life of struggle and poverty”.
Aid could help, but adolescent girls – already marginalised – have tended to be ignored, since development agencies have concentrated on the under-fives, who are at greatest risk. But there are now some signs that their importance is beginning to be recognised.
“You cannot begin to understand development without putting girls and women at the heart of your aid policies,” says Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary. He says that Britain will, by 2015, be supporting 700,000 girls in secondary school, and helping 2.3 million women to get jobs. That’s modest enough, compared with the size of the problem – but let’s hope it’s just a down payment for what looks like one of the most effective investments of all.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8813454/Teaching-girls-in-the-developing-world.html#disqus_thread
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