"There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls."
Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations
Educated mothers have fewer children, healthier children and better educated children. Educating girls is the single most cost-effective means of achieving human development and reducing poverty in the developing world according to the United Nations, the World Bank, and UNICEF.
Yet, 50 million girls in the world do not attend school, even though with an education, girls:
Educating girls is more effective in reducing birth rates than are family planning programs or other measures. The average fertility rate for a woman in the developing world is lowered by one child for every three years of education she has received.
Transforming Communities
Compassion Beyond Borders educates impoverished girls and illiterate women in 125 villages and communities in the developing world. This education empowers girls and women, transforming their lives, their families and their community.
The schools, education centers and women's organizations CBB funds become a resource to the community, offering a way out of poverty not only for the girls and women, but for their neighborhoods and villages as well.
Raising Women's Incomes
Most of the women's groups funded by Compassion Beyond Borders have a micro-bank. CBB's funding trains these women in literacy and health care, and also in learning a business skill. Literacy and their new skills enable the women to make constructive use of their bank, often for the first time. The women are empowered to begin a family businesses, earning an income that they spend on their family.
The increases in income that come from the education of females improve child survival rates 20 times more than equivalent increases in men's income, with the higher survival rates being accompanied by lower birth rates. However much the education of men produces economic development, it is primarily the education of girls and women that produces human development.
Educating Girls, Saving Lives
One billion people in the developing world, mainly women and children, survive on a dollar a day or less. In comparison, the poverty line in the U.S. is an income 15 times as large, and a middle class income 100 times as large. As a consequence, ten million children under the age of five in the developing world die every year from poverty, especially from diseases caused by malnutrition and the lack of sanitation.
When impoverished girls and illiterate women in the developing world receive an education, fewer children die from living in poverty. With higher levels of education, mothers begin their families when they are more mature, they understand sanitation and nutrition, they use medical professionals rather than home remedies, they can earn an income to purchase medicine for a sick child, they can read instructions on a medicine bottle, etc. The beneficial effect of education goes beyond the mothers themselves, spreading to their extended family and neighbors as well.
Throughout the developing world, poverty produces a maternal death rate needlessly large, leaving countless children without a mother. In Afghanistan, for example, this death rate is 100 times larger than in the U.S. Yet, when girls and women in the developing world are educated, fewer mothers die in childbirth.
Educated girls and women understand the importance of pre-natal and post-natal health care. They understand how to take care of themselves, when to seek help, and whom to seek for help. Again, the beneficial effects of female education spread to include the larger family and neighbors.
Educating girls and women is about gender equality--but it is much more than that. It is about saving the lives of young children and mothers. This is the work of Compassion Beyond Borders.
