To conclude on International Women’s Day, one might wonder what it represents for you? An opportunity to put women in the spotlight? The opportunity to take stock and plan measurable and achievable objectives? the need to remember what are the rights of women? For Dagoa, it’s a bit of all that, everything that advances the debate and leads to results.
But of all the rights of women, it is that of education that is undermined the most, because it is the lever of all the others. In far too many countries, girls do not go to school, for many reasons. “Poverty… early and forced marriages, tradition, trafficking and child labour” to name but a few. Plan International makes a realistic and poignant inventory through its article “Causes and consequences of discrimination against girls in education…
” In 2021, girls remain the first victims of inequality: 132 million girls aged 6 to 17 years are still deprived of school; 63% of illiterate adults in the world are women; 1 in 4 girls do not go to school in developing countries; 63 million girls are in forced labour; 12 million girls are forced into marriage each year before the age of 18, or nearly 33,000 girls a day; Nearly 120 million girls, or 1 in 10 girls under the age of 20, have experienced sexual violence.”
Plan International
But, they also evoke the major evolutions of society if there was not this discrimination for girls.
« A girl who does not go to school will find it more difficult to make her voice heard. Marginalized, she will not be able to express herself, make decisions that concern her body and her life, vote, participate actively in the decision-making of the society in which she lives and have a role as a free citizen… Each year passed by a girl on school benches increases her future income by 10 to 20%… An additional year of schooling for girls increases the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of a country by 0.37%. A child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive after age 5 »
Plan international
Men share the same observation.
“There is no instrument of development more effective than the education of girls”.
Kofi Annan, ex-Secrétaire des Nations Unies
Even in industrialized countries, there is discrimination in education and training. That’s why Social Builder’s slogan is “let’s feminize tech”. And, it is not the “womens forum” that will contradict them. Their observation is that…
“There is an urgent need for women, who contribute only 34% of the creation of global wealth, to be able to access the jobs of the future, which in reality are already the jobs of today. No one knows exactly what they will be. What we do know, however, is that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and not just digital, are at the heart of this transformation. This is why it is crucial that women have the same opportunities, the same strengths, the same skills and the same expertise as men to design these jobs of the future and benefit fully from them. It is a question of justice, equity, but also of economic performance: 240 million jobs can be created by 2025 and 28 trillion dollars added to global GDP if women and men are represented equally. »
womens forum