EDUCATION: Womens’ Education a Priority Need

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alex Whiting

LONDON, Mar 8 1999 (IPS) - World governments must make girls’ education a priority if their countries are to make any real advance in the future , senior United Nations officials noted Monday – International Women’s Day.

“Education is a fundamental human right and girls’ lesser access to education is not only a problem for girls as individuals, it is also a problem for the future of their countries,” said Joann Vanek, Chief of the Gender, Social and Housing Statistics department at the United Nations (UN), at a presentation here.

All children can reap the obvious benefits of education – greater independence and economic standing but, if girls were given a good education, not only would their own lives be improved, but also the lives of their children, he said.

UN statistics showed that women who received greater education married later and were more likely to have smaller families with healthier and better-educated children.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), there are more young people now than ever before – more than 1 billion aged between 15 and 24 years – and this age group is rapidly increasing in numbers many countries.

Nine hundred million of them live in developing countries.

“They have special needs for health care and education, including the very important area of sexual and reproductive health, both to fulfill their individual potential and to make the maximum possible contribution to development,” said Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of UNFPA in its recent report, ‘The State of World Population 1998′.

Vanek said that the “demographic revolution means investment in adolescents must be the centrepiece to economic development and a means to ensure the survival of countries.”

“Investment in the education of girls may be the biggest investment developing countries can make,” he added.

This challenge is not new. But 10 years after the signing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child – affirming the right for all children to have equal access to education – and nearly a decade after girls’ education was identified as “the most urgent priority” at the World Conference on Education for All, girls still suffered discrimination worldwide.

Of the 130 million 6 to 11-year-olds out of school in the developing world, nearly two thirds are girls. And not only do fewer girls than boys enrol in school, more girls than boys drop out, repeat grades or do not finish.

This was despite the fact that 96 percent of children lived in countries which had signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“Nearly one billion people, two thirds of them women, will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names – much less operate a computer or understand a simple application form. The world can no longer afford such an enormous waste of human potential,” said Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF.

The fact that girls who were educated were more likely to marry later and have fewer children, meant they were less likely to die in their teens, a health official declared.

Pregnancy-related complications are one of the major causes of death for girls aged 15-19. Three out of every four teenage girls in Africa alone are mothers, and 40 percent of births in this continent are to women under the age of 17.

“One fifth of young girls are married by the age of 16, and most of them have their first or second child by the time they are 20 years old, ” Pramilla Senenayake, Assistant Director General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), said at Monday’s presentation.

The impact of this on their health in later life can be enormous. Women who are 40 years old, can look twice their age simply because of the number of pregnancies their bodies have had to bear, Senenayake said.

“Women have the right over their hair, hands and feet but they have no control over their reproductive organs. Male lawyers, politicians, and priests are the ones who have control over them. They have become pawns for private corporations,” Senenayake said.

According to Bellamy education again was the key to overcome this. “Educated women are less likely to be oppressed or exploited and more likely to participate in political processes,” she said

All that is lacking, the UNICEF chief argued, was the political will and the resources to extend these educational benefits to all the world’s children.