By Joyce Connolly | Honorary Director
Thanks to your support every day is women’s day here at Snehalaya as we work to ensure gender equality including the right to education for girls. It can be a challenge as we recently learned when a UNICEF study ranked our district as 16th highest (out of a total of 723 districts in India) for child marriages. It’s been shown that girls who complete secondary school are 6x less likely to become child brides (Source: Girls Not Brides), According to the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative there are 62 million girls out of school worldwide and 142 million girls will be married before the age of 18 by 2020 if present trends continue (Source: United Nations Population Fund) which makes our recent and ongoing campaigns to promote girls’ education all the more vital.
As well as advocating for girls education we are also invited to share our insights and experience with global changemakers. As an example, yesterday we were honoured to have been invited to attend a Gender Empowerment Roundtable session with the World Benchmarking Alliance which has been tasked with establishing benchmarks to ensure UN Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality.
Discussions included the fact that women currently make 20% less than men, and they won’t reach pay equity with men until 2059, if the slow pace of progress on the pay gap persists. With UNICEF reporting that an extra year of education can help a girl earn 15-25% more as an adult and educated mothers being more than twice as likely to send their children to school, breaking down the barriers to girls and women has never been more important and we know that with your support we can make a difference.
We need your help to ensure we reach each and every girl in our district to educate and empower them to stand up for their rights. With this in mind, and building on our last three campaigns with Malala Fund, we will be delivering a girls’ education camp for up to 200 14-16 year old girls on 15 March. The aim is to recruit and train them as girls’ education peer mentors, joining our current network of over 50 of our beneficiaries who are already peer mentors in our projects, and help them to develop an action plan to promote women and child rights and advocate for equality in education in their own schools and communities. The plan is for them to report back on their progress and success on 12 July, Malala Day and there will be prizes for the best individual, team and school impact.
We are committed to empowering girls and have been fortunate enough to be shortlisted for GlobalGiving’s Girl Fund. Securing a place in the fund would earn us a full year of bonus funding dedicated to our projects for girls education. You can help us secure our place in the fund by voting for us through a donation. Donate right now and thanks to GlobalGiving's International Women's Day match funding, we will also secure a 30% bonus, meaning for every $1 you give, we will receive US$1.30.
Thank you so much for everyhting you do to support our girls, we really couldn't do it without you!
By Joyce Connolly | Honorary Director
By Joyce Connolly | Honorary Director
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