Originally published on the CGS blog on March 16, 2015.
Programs seeking to improve girls’ education around the world have a laundry list of critical justifications supporting them. In particular, girls’ education is seen as an important development tool. This World Bank report shows how uneducated women directly affect countries’ Gross Domestic Product; this infographic from USAID makes explicit how more girls in school improves GDP, increases agricultural output, and creates an investment in future generations because women are more likely to spend their money on their families than men are.
Simply put, educating girls is awesome for pretty much everybody.
But here’s what’s barely mentioned in too many of these reports: these education programs are educating girls. Their chief importance isn’t in economic benefits or the return on investment donors see in financial reports or improvements in the global economy. Educating girls matters because women matter.
Women matter because they are independent human beings capable of thinking for themselves and developing their own life plans. They are full of potential and can self-direct careers, families, and every kind of personal goal. Their lives can run the full range of the human experience. They are similar to men in important ways and different from men in important ways. In short, each woman is a unique and independent person who deserves equal treatment, respect, and dignity under international and domestic law. We even have an international treaty to that effect.
When societies deprive women of education, they do more than just damage their own society in the aggregate: they prevent individual women from reaching their own potential. Without an education, a woman may never read that one book, hear that certain piece of music, or encounter mathematics in a way that truly inspires her, whether as a member of the workforce, as a wife or mother, or as whatever she imagines.
Even more importantly, an education helps women – and everyone – establish a much firmer foothold in social institutions. By learning about how local laws and government work, a woman can be a better voter and a better participant in the political process. Even if a woman lives in a country without women’s suffrage, education helps women understand political issues and participate in the decision-making process, whether directly or through proxies.
That’s what we mean when we call something a human right – without it, people, in this case women, are in some important way deprived of the basic features of a healthy human life. Without an education, women lose their status as equal human beings because they aren’t able to fully develop their capacities to self-direct their lives personally, professionally, socially, or politically.
And as we have learned too well, it’s not merely a matter of girls having too little access to education, or living in societies that under-value women and their development. Instead, we also have to work to overcome groups that are harming and even killing girls because they are educating themselves.
Some of that work is already underway. New initiatives from the United Nations and civil society are focusing on girls’ education and building on recent progress. A new initiative from the Obama administration will seek to work at the community level not only to help get girls educated, but to help ensure communities value those girls and their educations. But we have to keep pressing our leaders, especially those working on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to ensure that girls fulfill their potential as the women they aspire to be. Girls’ education is the human right they – and we – deserve.
