Let's "Get Girls Into School."

[tyler arnot]

Check out this great article in this week's Newsweek about the
importance of girls education, especially in the developing world.
Help South Sudan Scholarship Foundation achieve the goal of greater
female enrollment in Sudan! www.southsudansf.org

Education: It’s Not Just About the Boys. Get Girls Into School.

Reprinted from Newsweek
September 23, 2008

Who wants more poor children around the world to go to school? Raise
your hand. Yep, everyone's hand is up. Education is the ultimate mom-
and-apple-pie (or rice-and-beans) issue. Everyone's for it. But our
best efforts to get more impoverished kids into schools aren't always
effective. Despite some recent progress in China and India, 73 million
children worldwide don't go to primary school. Three times as many
never go to secondary school. Though they can sometimes be trained
later in life, their shortened time in school is often a major
impediment to advancement. These kids are mostly doomed to a life of
poverty, and so are their families.
The way out is not just to champion education generally but to focus
intently on one subset of the problem: girls, who make up nearly 60
percent of the kids out of school. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa,
only one in five girls gets any education at all. Here's where to zero
in on the challenge: most of the benefits that accompany increased
education are attributable to girls, who use their schooling more
productively than boys. Women in the developing world who have had
some education share their earnings; men keep a third to a half for
themselves.

"The reason so many experts believe educating girls is the most
important investment in the world is how much they give back to their
families," says Gene Sperling, a former top economic adviser to
President Bill Clinton (and currently advising Barack Obama).
Sperling's book, "What Works in Girls' Education" (with Barbara Herz),
is simultaneously disturbing and encouraging. It's disheartening to
think of how far we have to go to get all kids into school—one of the
United Nations Millennium Development Goals launched in 2000 to
accelerate progress on fighting poverty, disease and other social
ills. But it's also hopeful: at least we can focus on a specific
solution.

When girls go to school, they marry later and have fewer, healthier
children. For instance, if an African mother has five years of
education, her child has a 40 percent better chance of living to age
5. A World Health Organization study in Burkina Faso showed that
mothers with some education were 40 percent less likely to subject
their children to the practice of genital mutilation. When girls get
educated, they are three times less likely to contract HIV/AIDS.

Unfortunately, many African parents still don't know that their own
lives can be greatly improved if their daughters go to school. They're
often uncomfortable when their girls have to travel long distances to
school (making them more subject to sexual predators). Girls
themselves grow uncomfortable in school when they have no separate
latrines. They fear being spied on by boys; their parents agree and
withdraw them. This is the kind of everyday impediment to progress
that aid organizers notice on the ground but rarely becomes part of
the debate.

The biggest barrier to primary and secondary education in the
developing world remains the fees that too many countries continue to
charge parents for each child in school. Sometimes it's a flat fee;
sometimes it's barely disguised as a fee for books or school uniforms.
The practical effect is that poor families (disproportionately in
rural areas, where school attendance is lightest) send their two
oldest, healthiest boys to school with the hope that they will support
their parents in their old age. This often deprives girls—the ones
actually much more likely to help their families—of the chance to go
to school.

The waste of human capital is incalculable. Consider that only 5
percent of children with disabilities get any education at all in the
developing world. Countries like Kenya and Uganda, which have
abolished fees, have seen a flood of new students, with enrollments
surging by 30 percent or more. So why haven't other developing nations
followed their example? It's not the loss of fee revenue but the
absence of a large-enough education infrastructure to sustain the
influx of new students. Five years after abolishing fees, Kenya still
needs 40,000 new teachers. Officials there say they can't meet the
need without more consistent funding.

Donor nations and NGOs are increasingly reaching a consensus that
global education, especially for girls, is the keystone to the arch of
development. The Millennium Development Goals of universal primary
education with gender equity are among the hottest topics at
international conferences. But Sperling calls these "the world's most
ambitious and pathetic goals—ambitious because so many countries are
not on track to reach them; pathetic because of the idea that five or
six years of primary education will suffice when there's no real
demonstrable advantage without eight."

The challenge extends beyond funding to changing the culture of the
developing world. Fathers must be convinced that if their daughters go
to school, they will learn enough math to help them in the market.
Mothers must learn that while sending their daughters to school might
mean one fewer pair of hands to help around the house, their families
will be better off in the long run. "This is not a disease without a
known cure," says Sperling. "These things work everywhere." If these
become the mom-and-apple-pie values of the developing world, we'll all
win.

© 2008