Educating Girls Creates Healthier Countries

03/19/2007

Educating Girls Creates Healthier Countries

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
Benjamin Franklin

Fewer than one in five girls in all of sub-Saharan Africa complete secondary school, and there are millions more girls worldwide who will never move beyond primary school. A new book published by the Academy for Educational Development (AED), Keeping the Promise: Five Benefits of Girls’ Secondary Education, clearly and succinctly presents data and analysis on the importance of educating girls in developing countries. It also illustrates the impact educating girls has on the day-to-day lives of real families the writer has met through her more than 30 years of experience in the field (www.aed.org/News/pressreleases/keeping_promise.html).

According to the book’s author, May Rihani, senior vice president and director of the AED Global Learning Group, there are five main social and economic benefits that society will reap as a result of educating girls at the secondary level:

The presence of more secondary schools will increase primary enrollment and completion and improve overall education quality.
Education beyond primary school results in an increase in civic participation and lower rates of youth violence and human trafficking.
Health benefits from educating girls are immense, including significant decreases in infant mortality, lower teen birth rates, smaller families, and higher immunization rates and improved nutrition for children.
Rates of HIV and AIDS decrease when girls are educated.
Poverty is reduced as educated girls command higher wages and increase agricultural productivity.

“Countries can’t move forward economically if girls don’t receive an education,” said Rihani, a leading expert on girls’ education who has developed successful programs in 14 countries in Africa and the Middle East. “But you have to educate at least 35% of girls at the secondary level to expect serious political, economic and social change to happen.”

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