The Untapped Potential

Globally it is believed that ensuring girls stay in school is one of the most effective ways to prevent child marriage. During all my community engagements and development work in South Asia with adolescent girls it got proven that Education empowers women to overcome discrimination. I heard girls mentioning that they have tremendous pressure from parents to get married. Those who were married and recalled how a small decision could have changed their lives mentioned that education is very important for a young girl as it makes her very independent education is very important to a girl, as it makes her very independent, and gives her a chance to stand on her own feet. The society looks down on girls, who are not educated, and takes them for granted and treats them badly. An educated woman is respected. Parents of a girl child are not very supportive in educating her. Whereas they think it is important to educate the boy child, so that he can grow up, get a job and support the family.

Education is very important to a girl, as it makes her very independent, and gives her a chance to stand on her own feet. The society looks down on girls, who are not educated, and takes them for granted and treats them badly. An educated woman is respected. Parents of a girl child are not very supportive in educating her. Whereas they think it is important to educate the boy child, so that he can grow up, get a job and support the family.

These girls are most vulnerable to getting pressurized by their families to drop out of school. According to the Education for All campaign one in seven girls have children before age 17 in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. In these regions, 10% fewer girls would become pregnant if they all had primary education, and 59% fewer would if they all had secondary education. This would result in around 2 million fewer early births.

1.8 billion young people are a powerful force, individually and collectively. They are shaping social and economic realities, challenging norms and values, and building the foundation of the world’s future. Never before have there been so many young people.

Adolescent girls and young women who are educated have greater awareness of their rights, and greater confidence and freedom to make decisions that affect their lives. Keeping girls in schools and letting them make important decisions in their communities.

For females especially, gender differences—not sex differences—translate to poverty and lack of power, and prevent women and girls from fully contributing to and thriving in their societies.

If all girls completed primary school in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, the number of girls getting married by age 15 would fall by 14%; with secondary education, 64% fewer girls would get married. In Ethiopia, for example, while almost one in three young women with no education were married by the age of 15 in 2011, only 9% were married among women with secondary education. Because of the weakness or absence of legal sanctions on child marriage, other approaches are being tried, including those aimed at keeping girls in school and working with community members to change norms around early marriage and childbearing. This is where strategic leadership models come into place to signify the importance of building leadership on a foundation of education, involving boys and men deliberately to be apart of the plan, changing social norms, attitudes and behaviourto support girls’ rights.

I always wondered how change will happen in the next decade and the decade after that and then the next.... Would the development goals for education, public policies, international agreements and conventions all get diluted one day?

It never will! – since every discussion of overcoming poverty requires an acknowledgement of education as a basic human right and as an important driver of social and economic development. It gives us hope of keep moving forward to build capacities, knowledge and the developing a real stamina for making transparent changes.

Karuna Dayal works as a Program Manager focusing on right to education, gender equality and women and child rights issues with the Multiple Action Research Group (MARG), a national level NGO working on Legal Empowerment of marginalised communities in India. MARG believes that a good way to ensure justice is to legally empower people to demand it. Legal empowerment equips people to understand their rights, secure their enforcement and pursue remedies when these rights are violated.

Karuna has previously served as a Policy Fellow at CARE USA with their Gender and Empowerment Team as an EGLI Atlas Corps Fellow at Washington D.C. She has curated for the Twitter accounts of Sayfty and Safecity. She has worked on a wide range of Human Rightsissues specifically related to violence against women, children and marginalised communities, both at grassroots and strategy formulation levels, encompassing project management & implementation, advocacy, strategy and development. She is a strong advocate for social change and how we can use innovation and technology to leverage its processes.

Follow her on Twitter@karunadayal and on Instagram @karunadayal