Women Empowerment: Investing in Girls & Women for High ROI

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Women Empowerment: Investing in Girls & Women can provide Huge ROI

11 Jul 2020
- admin
Change cannot happen in isolation; Change comes with Collaboration.

I have been a gender equality advocate for almost 3 years now. As I entered the world of Business, Policy Advocacy and Women’s Empowerment, the one thing that really disturbed me the most was the fact that every problem we see in the world connects itself to women making them the most effected population in globally.

Whether I talk about topics ranging from Climate Change, Health and Nutrition, Political Participation and Decision Making, Education, Economy and so on – I can help you find evidence that connects it all to gender inequality and thus the fact that women need to be kept at the center of any national or local transformational process. Investment for Girls and Women can fuel our collective efforts towards achieving gender equality. Globally millions of women are affected by a wide array of problems that majority of the population very easily tend to overlook.

Let’s just talk about one of the issues that I strongly care about and have been actively advocating for since the past couple of years: Investment in Girls’ Education

Educating Girls and women is a powerful investment that benefits both individuals and the society by unlocking the potential to improve health, nutrition, social justice, democracy, human rights, social cohesion and economic prosperity for current and future generations. But we live in a world where a girl is 1.5 times more likely to be denied their right to a primary education. We live in a world where 63% of illiterate adults are women.

Ensuring high quality education for girls can have a positive ripple effect in society. One additional school year can increase a woman’s earnings by up to 20%. If all mothers completed primary education, maternal death would be reduced by 2/3rd – saving approx 1,89,000 lives globally every year. Each extra year of education in a girl’s life decreases the probability of her contracting HIV by 6.7%. Across 54 countries in the world, having access to secondary education ensures that a woman is 4 times less likely to lack control over household resources, domestic abuse or being married young.

Education also protects girls from harmful practices like Child Marriage, FGM and protects them from falling victim to heinous web of human trafficking. It empowers girls to challenge gender stereotypes benefiting both women and men.

As I mentioned earlier, investing in girls and women creates a ripple effect that yields multiple benefits, not only for individual women, but also for families, communities, businesses and countries. Given the transformative power it has, the education of girls and women is a cost-effective investment. A one-year increase in girls’ education is associated with a 6.5–9.9% reduction in child mortality. Educating women also helps break inter-generational poverty. Women who are better educated have fewer unplanned children, marry later, and drive national economic growth.

In August 2009, the Indian parliament passed the landmark Right to Education Act that made education free and compulsory for children between the ages 6 and 14. In a report in 2018, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights stated around 40 percent of 15 to 18-year-old-girls were out of school and among them almost 65 percent were engaged in household work. Currently, Indian women contribute to only 18 percent to the country’s GDP — one of the lowest in the world — and only 25 percent of India’s labour force is women.

India could add a whopping $770 billion to the country’s GDP by 2025 by encouraging girls to study and participate in the workforce according to McKinsey’s gender parity report in May 2018. It is a long road ahead which needs collective effort of individuals, societies, Institutions, Businesses and so on to invest in this area.

My own journey working in the Social sector has made me understand and accept that the future needs Women in Entrepreneurship, Business and Social Work. The new wave of Social entrepreneurship across the world, especially projects led by women, makes me more hopeful. Enabling women, educating them and helping them create businesses is truly and directly changing lives every day, even if the business itself never reaches popular status. Social enterprise is on the rise among young and innovative entrepreneurs, and socially-conscious ventures may just be the way of the future to solve the world’s most pressing social problems.

Can you think of ways we can actively advocate for access to quality education for all?

Thought Piece by:

Olivia Deka

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