Education Empowers Women and Girls
- Particularly for women and girls, the economic and personal empowerment that education provides allows them to make healthier choices for themselves and their families.
- Benefits of girls’ education include not only the r educing the impact of HIV/AIDS, but reduction of poverty, improvement of the health of women and their children, delay of marriage, reduction of female genital cutting, and increase in self-confidence and decision-making power.
- On average, for a girl in a poor country, each additional year of education beyond grades three or four will lead to 20 percent higher wages and a 10 percent decrease in the risk of her own children dying of preventable causes.
Education Contributes to Improving Child Survival and Maternal Health
- A child born to an educated mother is more than twice as likely to survive to the age of five as a child born to an uneducated mother.
- Educated mothers are 50 percent more likely to immunize their children than mothers with no schooling.
- Women with six or more years of education are more likely to seek prenatal care, assisted childbirth, and postnatal care, reducing the risk o f maternal and child mortality and illness
Education Helps Reduce Hunger
- Expanding education for girls is one of the most powerful ways to fight hunger.Gains in women’s education made the most significant difference in r educing malnutrition, out-performing a simple increase in the availability of food. A 63-country study by the International Food Policy Research Institute(IFPRI) found that more productive farming as a result of female education accounted for 43 percent of the decline in malnutrition achieved between 1970 and 1995.
- Crop yields in Kenya could rise up to 22 percent if women farmers had the same education and inputs (such as fertilizer, credit, investment) as men farmers.
Education Contributes to the Fight against HIV/AIDS
- Educated people are healthier people. HIV/AIDS infection rates are halved among young people who finish primary school. If every girl and boy received a complete primary education, at least 7 million new cases of HIV could be prevented in a decade.
- A Ugandan study showed that rural Ugandans with secondary education have a 75 percent lower rate of HIV infection than those with no education.
- The ability of girls to avoid HIV infection is so strongly associated with attendance at school that education is known as a “social vaccine” against the virus.A Zambian study found that AIDS spread twice as fast among uneducated as among educated girls.
Education Helps Fight Poverty & Spur Economic Growth
- Education is a prerequisite for short and long-term economic growth: No country has achieved continuous and rapid economic growth without at lea st 40 percent of adults being able to read and write.
- Failing to offer girls the same educational opportunity as boys costs developing countries $92 billion each year, according to a study by Plan International. That's $1 trillion per decade in forgone earnings and unnecessary costs.
- A person’s earnings increase by 10 percent for each year of schooling they receive, translating to a one percent annual increase in GDP if good quality education is offered to the entire population.
- Then chief economist of the World Bank and current top economic adviser for President Obama, Lawrence Summers, asserted that “educating girls’ yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world.”
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