Last week over 60 members of parliaments from around the world met in Paris to discuss a crucial issue at the heart of development: the role that girls play in the development of the world and its population. Overlooked until now, the parliamentarians present from five different continents sealed their commitment to pushing their leaders to recognize the importance of protecting the rights and harnessing the potential of the 600 million girls and young women across the developing world: they are its most vulnerable citizens and its most valuable asset.
Girls and young women are at the core of development. They give birth, bring up, educate and nourish the next generation of citizens. Studies have shown that when they are better educated they will have fewer children, that these children will be healthier and they will in turn receive a better education. And yet across the developing world girls and young women are being systematically denied their rights to an education, to be able to decide on when they reproduce and to enjoy the same rights as their male counterparts. As a consequence girls and young women are suffering more than men, to the detriment of society as a whole.
Around the world over one thousand women die of complications arising from childbirth every day. This is the greatest single danger facing women in the developing world. This risk of maternal mortality is disproportionately high for girls who are pregnant, who are not fully enough developed to cope with the trauma of giving birth as well as fully mature women. And even when giving birth does not damage a mother’s health, becoming a mother will inevitably have an impact on her educational and economic future. For she will often be barred from school, and relegated to a life of full-time domestic duties. Younger women also are particularly vulnerable to the menace of HIV infection, and it has been calculated that three quarters of the people between 15 and 24 living with HIV in the developing world are female.
But these are just some of the indignities and human rights abuses that girls are being forced to suffer in the developing world throughout their lives. Any number of additional problems could be mentioned, which can even start before they are born. It has been calculated, for example, that over the past decade 6 million female foetuses have been aborted across India, owing to the lesser status associated with girls. And where they are carried out in squalid, uncertified circumstances, these procedures can lead to the death of not only the foetus, but also the mother. Other human rights’ violations can also include forced domestic labour and abusive procedures carried out in the name of tradition, such as female genital cutting and breast ironing.
Despite the undeniable abuse that girls are undergoing and their enormous importance as sentient, empowered human beings and economic actors, development policy is failing to invest in protecting them. And this lack of prioritization is clear not only in the financial figures invested in them, but also in the rhetoric of too many donor governments and authorities about the issue. For less than 2 percent of development assistance is being invested in girls and young women, and when questioned about activities it is undertaking to protect young girls in developing countries the European Commission’s woolly rhetoric indicates that none of its education or health projects has a specific focus on girls.
Failing to invest in girls is in itself one of the most drastic human rights abuses in the developing world. At the summit in Paris the parliamentarians present unified their voices to call upon G8 and G20 leaders to “listen to girls”. For investing in girls’ rights and ability to plan their families has the potential break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, and to bring about development that is both human and economic in nature.
My call to the G8 and G20 leaders is therefore for them to ask themselves what they would do if the girl who is vulnerable to all the gravest dangers associated with poverty, and who is deprived of education, her rights and her freedom to choose her family size were their daughter? For behind each face there is a human story. There is vulnerability and yet there is tremendous value. And there is either a tragedy or a triumph waiting to happen. |
"It’s time to focus on the situation faced by girls in the developing world and to rectify the misallocation of development resources." This article was published in New Europe on 29th May 2011.