WUNRN
Girl Revolution
Ashish T. Galande
"It’s a massive
voice—not a single girl speaking alone."
The world is waking up to
the fact that the greatest force for global change is growing up right before
our eyes.
A new session unexpectedly stole the show
at the 2009 World Economic Forum in
Why all the fuss? Lee Howell, Davos Annual
Meeting Director, says girls were on the agenda for the first time in the
meeting’s 39-year history because, as he puts it, “The field work, economic
analysis, and experience all point to the powerful effect you’ll have if you invest
in girls. People have to do more with less. If that’s the context we’re
operating in, then the girl effect is an answer.”
Out of the Shadows
It’s a simple concept whose time has
finally arrived. Study after study shows that girls—more than 600 million
strong in the developing world—hold the key to their communities’ successful
future when they’re schooled and mentored in leadership. When a girl in the
developing world gets at least seven years of education, she will get married
four years later and have 2.2 fewer children, breaking the intergenerational
cycle of poverty. And an educated girl will apply 90% of her income back into
her family, while a boy invests only 35%. Even one extra year of primary school
boosts girls’ potential wages by as much as 20%, according to a 2002 study from
the World Bank in
Yet, despite overwhelming evidence that
helping girls escape poverty is the key to healthy social and economic growth,
only a meager 0.6% of development money goes to this demographic.
If it’s so logical, why hasn’t the world
been investing in girls? According to Melinda Gates, “the issue wasn’t brought
to the forefront before, so when NGOs or foundations or civil society were
developing their programs, they just weren’t thinking that way. If you don’t
think about this…you don’t build it into the program from the get-go. Part of
it’s just a mind shift.”
“Girls are quite invisible,” says Tamara
Kreinin, executive director of Women and Population at the UN Foundation in
Growing Our Girls
Although many organizations that help
educate girls and build leadership skills have emerged since the 1990s, the
movement is only now gaining real traction. A turning point hit when the Center
for Global Development released a report last year called “Girls Count” that
detailed the shocking inequities girls face in many areas of the world, and the
impact this has on economies. Nonprofits and corporations alike took notice.
The UN Foundation partnered with the Nike
Foundation and 30 other international organizations to establish the Coalition
for Adolescent Girls, which aims to direct funds toward the development of
young women. Then the Nike Foundation, along with the Buffett’s NoVo
Foundation, launched an unprecedented $100-million Girl Effect initiative in
2008 to help adolescent girls in developing countries foster social and
economic change among their families, communities, and nations. Program
director of NoVo Foundation, Pamela Shifman, says that before settling on
girls, the Buffetts undertook a deep quest to understand how their foundation
could have the greatest impact.
“After many meetings and discussions they
realized that they wanted to get to the root of domination, and that the most
unheard person in the world is a girl.”
But perhaps the
biggest megaphone of all for a new landscape for girls is the Nike Foundation
and the NoVo Foundation’s short, online video called “The Girl Effect.” Since
its inception last year, it has become a runaway viral hit that has branded the
issue globally.
Girl Revolution
Girls at the Center of Success
“What’s been most successful are programs that
look at all aspects of a girl’s life, health, education, and livelihood of her
family and community,” says Kreinin of the UN Foundation. “You have to ask
their families, ‘How can we work with you so you have the resources you need so
this girl can go to school?’ To shift the culture, you have to open up the
conversation.”
Case in point: When Ann Cotton, founder of
CAMFED, an international group that educates and empowers young African girls,
launched her program in rural Zimbabwe in the early ‘90s, she asked the chief
of the village for permission to hold a community meeting about how best to
integrate more girls into their schools. Hundreds of people walked for miles to
attend. “The roadblock wasn’t a culture that is resistant to girls’ education,”
says Cotton. “The reality was that most parents didn’t have the means to send
all of their children to school. Most parents in rural Africa have not had an
education, and they want that for their daughters very badly.” Cotton worked
within the existing structures of teachers, police, and the judiciary to figure
out how to make the journey to school less dangerous for girls and to work out
ways for girls to be relieved of their agricultural chores in order to have the
time to get an education. Now, nearly 650,000 girls in four African nations
have benefited from CAMFED’s educational programs.
For Betty Makoni, founder of the Girl Child
Network in Zimbabwe, the girl empowerment issue is deeply personal. Makoni was
raped and witnessed her father murder her mother when she was only 9-years-old.
In 1999, Makoni started GCN, determined to help today’s girls avoid the horrors
of her own childhood. “As a young girl, I saw injustices toward my mother,”
says Makoni. “It was hard to see an adult woman in pain. I tried to tell her to
break the silence, but she wouldn’t have it. I realized if I had economic
opportunity, we could break the silence together.”
Makoni believes that if you reach girls early
enough, they will grow up empowered and, unlike Makoni’s mother, will be able
to speak out against abuse and injustice. “We provide the means for girls to
work around the societal barriers they face,” she insists.
GCN, which coaches girls in leadership
training, has worked with more than 30,000 girls over its decade of operation;
there are currently 700 girls clubs across Zimbabwe, with chapters beginning to
take form in other African nations.
“It’s a massive voice—not a single girl
speaking alone,” says Makoni. And that voice has had the tone, pitch, and
strength to lobby successfully for laws outlawing virginity testing, protecting
girls from forced marriage, and making the rape of a young girl punishable by
life in prison, making Zimbabwe one of the only African nations to explicitly
protect girls against these common practices.
Passing the Torch
Successful girl-empowerment programs are now
reaping what they’ve sown. The initial girls they invested in are now returning
to their communities to teach, advocate for, and mentor other girls. “They are
united by a background of rural poverty, and that experience gives them
empathy, and that empathy gives them the impetus to act,” says Cotton. “They
are a generation of activists who are tireless in what they will do for
others.”
CAMFED alum Esnart Chulu, 18, of Mpika,
Zambia, launched a preschool earlier this year for street children and orphans
in her village that receives funding from Zambia’s Ministry of Education. The
school currently has 65 children enrolled and won’t turn anyone away if their
parents can’t afford the minimal fee. “If a child goes to preschool, she has a
foundation to go on to the next grade and won’t be roaming around getting into
trouble,” says Chulu. “They can make something of their lives.”
The Girl Child Network has now nurtured enough
talent to allow Makoni to take a step back and allow some of her graduates to
direct the course of its future. “We discovered if you don’t have girls in the
hierarchy of the organization, it fails,” she explains. “If we don’t understand
the language girls use, we don’t understand their challenges.”
Girls Unite!
One of the linchpins of the movement’s
continued success lies with the concept of uniting girls’ voices into a
collective power—akin to taking a classroom conversation to an international
scale. Organizations like the Girls International Forum hold summits where
girls around the world get together to share ideas about how to change public
policy. “It’s important for them to see they’re part of a global society,” says
Zora Radosevich, GIF’s executive director. “So often girls are isolated, and
they want change to happen. It helps for them to talk to other girls. We teach
them how to build a network of allies so they feel comfortable in a public
policy forum.”
Other groups build those bonds virtually. New
Moon Girl Media has created an online community where girls aged 8 to 12 can
express themselves in a safe, creative, and positive space. “They share videos,
poetry, articles, music, opinions, and they help each other with problems,”
says New Moon founder Nancy Gruver. “It supports girls in staying true to who
they are, and helping them to resist stereotypes and pressure to fit into
someone else’s idea of who they should be.”
“Girls have got a lot of potential,” says
Makoni. “How we bring that out is the key issue. When you begin to undo
whatever negativity was instilled in them, you see they become a totally
different species. They have so much power. It’s too late to make that happen
if you reach a woman rather than a girl.” Adds Cotton: “The only way we can do
that well is to listen respectively to girls themselves. And in learning from
them, we can develop programs that work.”
As eyes increasingly turn to the real
experts—girls themselves—the world is finding that girls have been ready for
this revolution all along.
“I’ve always known that a girl possesses the
key to her community’s development and an extraordinary power to effect social
change,” says Sejal Hathi, age 17, founder and president of Girls Helping
Girls, which has trained and mobilized over 5,000 girls from 15 nations. “Girls
are the movers and shakers!”
Changed Minds
At the close of that historic Davos session,
World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala called out to the audience.
“Raise your hand,” she said, “if you now understand and believe in why we must
invest in girls.” Everyone raised their hands.
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