The
COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all of
our lives, with education systems all over the world severely impacted, but for
women and girls so much more is at stake. At the height of school closures, 1.6
billion children and young people were out of education around the world with
girls disproportionately affected. The pandemic compounds and exacerbates the
many obstacles they already face to getting a quality education like poverty,
gender-based violence, FGM, child marriage, and a lack of access to sexual and
reproductive health services.
اضافة اعلان
Prior to the pandemic, girls were already
facing an
education crisis. In sub-Saharan Africa, 33.3 million girls of
primary and lower secondary school age were out of school. The number rises to
52.2 million when considering girls of upper secondary school age. In South Asia,
most of the 20.6 million children at lower secondary level who were out of
school were adolescent girls. In the Middle East and North Africa region, one
in every five children were out of school with adolescent girls one and a half
times more likely to be out of school at the lower secondary level. Across
Europe and America, 0.4 million girls were out of school.
There is now a real risk of a lost
generation of girls, as many as 16 million disadvantaged children may not
return to school at all with secondary age girls most at risk of staying home
or marrying early because their families have fallen into poverty. This is a
global crisis. We must act as a global community to tackle it.
That is why the UK, Kenya, and the Global
Partnership for Education (GPE) are co-hosting the Global Education Summit at
the end of this month in London, bringing world leaders together to invest in
education and improve access for girls. The aim is to set GPE on a path to
raising $5 billion over the next five years to transform education in the
world’s most vulnerable countries. This will give 175 million more children the
chance to learn. That is not only the lives of tens of millions of individuals
improved. That is also millions of communities transformed for the better.
In
Jordan the UK is proud to be an advocate for girls’ education, in particular we
have been leading the International Community to advocate and support host and
refugee girls whose education has been affected by conflict and crises. Since
2016 along with other donors, we have supported around 65,000 Syrian girls and
their access to quality education each year through the Jordan Compact
Education Program. Since 2015, the UK and USAID Early Grade Reading and Math
Improvement Program (RAMP) has transformed teaching within the education sector
and reached around 325,000 early grade girls and trained over 18,000 female
teachers.
Investing in girls’ education is a
game-changer for everyone. It boosts incomes and develops economies. With just
one additional school year, a woman’s earnings can increase by a fifth. $28
trillion could be added to global GDP if women had the same role in the labor
market as men. Investing in girls’ education also creates healthier and safer
societies. A child whose mother can read is 50 percent more likely to live
beyond the age of 5 years, twice as likely to attend school themselves, and 50
percent more likely to be immunized. If every girl went to secondary
school, infant mortality could be cut in half, saving 3 million lives every
year.
If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it
is how interconnected we all are. Girls’ education is no different. By giving
all girls the chance to access 12 years of quality education, we will have a
fighting chance to lift people out of poverty, grow economies, save lives, and
build back better from COVID-19.
The funding we raise from the Global
Education Summit will go to GPE, the largest partnership and fund dedicated to
transforming education in lower-income countries. This will mean practical
support for education in 90 countries and territories around the world. The UK
has committed £430 million of new UK aid for GPE which will go towards helping
the 1.1 billion children across these countries over the next five years. Since
its creation in 2002, GPE has already contributed to getting 160 million more
children into school and to the doubling of girls’ enrolment in the countries
they work in.
But we are not done yet. The pandemic risks
undoing much of the great progress we have made so far. Now is the time for the
global community to step up, fund education and improve access for girls. If we
want to change the world for the better, girls’ education is a good place to
start.
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