The Girl Effect.

I heard a story about a university in England. The first university to allow women to attend. A guest lecturer was speaking that day, upon arriving he walked into the lecture hall only to discover, that for some unknown reason, all the men of the class were absent and that the room was full of women. He said,  

"As there is no one here. This lecture is cancelled." 

 Hearing this story made my blood boil! If I was there, I would have wanted to pick up my chair and peg it at him! Or maybe if I was feeling a little less violent and a bit more lady like, I would have been tempted to use his butt as a dart board, for my perfectly sharpened pencils, as he turned and walked away. But I probably would have been more submissive that I am now,  if I was raised in that culture and time. The scary part is that women are still treated as nothing. As worse than nothing in some countries. To be raped, abused, used for their bodies and rejected for their minds.

Another huge problem in third world countries is that people are starving, have bad health, poor life expectancy and no money. These things we can't in good conscience ignore, and we haven't. But the problem is, we've been going about it the wrong way. Check out the graph below.

This one shows, that if we increase the amount of people living in an area, by either giving them health treatments- increasing longevity, or helping them to have more viable healthy babies, what we're really doing is making them as a country more poor than before. Because we now have increased the population, so many more people are living in the same areas, with the same amount of 'wealth' just to be 'shared' between more people.

Seems rather hopeless doesn't it? But it's not! We've been making poorer nations more poor and more dependent on us, all because we didn't want to see them suffer. We can't ignore their suffering. So what can we do?

That's where The Girl Effect comes in. The solution to poverty is education. Particularly that of Girls. There are 50 MILLION twelve year old girls living in poverty. 

That is 50 million solutions.

If girls are educated there are so many positives that would come to both them and their nations.

1. the girls are stay in school safe from sex trades, helping prevent more cases of HIV.
2. the girls don't have children, who then would grow up to live in poverty and continue the cycle, this means there is less malnutrition.
3. the girls stay healthy.
4. the girls become women who can contribute to society, and reinvest more money into their families than the men do.

But that means they'd have to be used for their minds, and would become strong enough mentally to fight for their rights not to be abused. This means they need us to fight for them, because right now they can't fight for themselves.

The videos say it far better than I ever could. It Puts chills down my spine every time I watch it.

Now that, Is the power of a Girl. 

  

"Educate Girls. Change the World."

 
Here is another video if you want to have a look, the other two are the better ones though this one is still really good.

10x10 Messaging Video from The Documentary Group on Vimeo.
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