The upward spiral
Educate a man, and you educate one person; educate a woman, and you educate an entire family.
African folk saying
With an education, girls and women:
Educating girls is a more effective way of reducing population growth than any family planning program. For every three years of schooling a mother has had, she has one less child.
The education of girls creates an upward spiral that lasts beyond their lifetime, breaking the cycle of poverty.
Overcoming poverty
Seventy percent of the world's poor are women and girls. Poor girls may receive little or no education or the skills to earn an income. They do not learn about sanitation, nutrition and health care, which would prevent 90% of illness in their families.
Forty million girls of school age in the world are not in school. With little or no education, these girls commonly begin to raise families at or soon after puberty, beginning still another generation of poverty. Poverty is a vicious cycle that reproduces itself--a cycle that the average poor family does not escape.
All too often, developing countries achieve rapid rates of economic growth while leaving their poverty rates unchanged. And yet, other developing economies have reduced their poverty below levels in the United States. The difference between these two outcomes lies in providing an equal education to girls.
Educated girls do not become mothers at puberty, as uneducated girls do. Educated mothers have fewer, healthier and better educated children, which begins to move the family out of poverty. The children of educated mothers also have fewer, healthier and better educated children. Each generation moves further out of poverty, reducing infant and maternal mortality and increasing life expectancy for the entire family. The benefits of educating a girl continue generation after generation.
Men may produce economic development, but it is women who produce human development.
What is poverty?
We in the developed world may consider poverty as having a low income, living without what the middle class has. Such poverty can easily be found in the United States, and yet this is a deeply deficient understanding of poverty in the developing world.
Poverty means not having the necessities of life. The World Bank measures poverty in the developing world as a person living on less than $1.25 a day, a figure also used by the UN, UNICEF and other international organizations. One billion people, most of them women and children, are poor according to this definition.
The international poverty line is 1/12 of the poverty line in the U.S. A poor person in the developing world survives--or doesn't survive--on a cost of living approximately equal to a cat or dog in the U.S. Poverty in the developed world and poverty in the developing world are worlds apart.
Minus the necessities of life
Living in poverty may mean living on far less than $1.25 a day. For example, two sisters CBB sponsors in India each live on the equivalent of 70 cents a day. Another girl graduated from high school while surviving on the equivalent of 26 cents a day. Without question, there are girls even poorer.
How can people live on an income too low to have the necessities of life? The answer is that they don't--they die. Life expectancies in the developing world are ten to forty years less than in the United States, as little as half a lifetime here. Many of the world's poor live no longer than they would have lived 2,000 years ago.
In the developing world, mortality rates for children born into poverty are ten to thirty times higher than in the U.S. Ten million children under the age of five die of poverty every year. That's more than die from any disease or famine, it's more than have died in any year of any war at any time in history. It's one every three seconds.
Poverty and the lack of education are a leading cause of women dying in childbirth. Half a million women in the developing world die of pregnancy and childbirth every year. The maternal death rate in Afghanistan, for example, is 100 times higher than in the U.S., and it can be even higher in Africa. In Afghanistan one family in eight ends up without a mother and wife.
"There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls."
Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations
One girl's story: Claudia
Claudia's mother did not have the money for her to go middle school, and so she was working as a maid in Guatemala City, helping to support her family. Then, she was given a scholarship to return to school, first by CBB's predecessor organization and then by CBB.
Claudia never needed very much, earning most of her education expenses herself, and asking only for what she lacked. With her scholarships, Claudia was able to complete middle school, then high school, and finally university training as a professional nurse.
Along with a team of ten assistants whom she trained, Claudia provided pre- and post-natal care to women and their newborns in 26 Mayan mountain villages of Guatemala. She attended the mothers and 400 newborns a year, visiting them in their villages every month. Under her care, the deaths of children under five years of age declined from twelve to four a year--that's eight lives a year that Claudia was saving.
Claudia now is responsible for the health care of 18 rural villages in another remote area of Guatemala. Again, she visits each village every month, functioning as the village doctor.
