In both ordinary times and times of crisis, one of the best ways to tackle many of the issues facing the world today — from poverty to gender-based violence to climate change — is to provide primary school-aged girls with a quality education. Despite this, some 122 million girls worldwide are out of school. Too many girls and women are held back by bias, social norms, and expectations influencing the education they receive and the subjects they study. Around the world, 120 million girls — one in 10 — under the age of 20 have experienced sexual violence. Bullying, including gender-based bullying, is a common form of violence taking place in schools. We know that these trends are made worse by the impact of crisis, conflict and climate change on women and girls.
Tagged: girls
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COVID-19 has highlighted inequalities worldwide and is showing us that our systems — and the progress we have celebrated — may not be as resilient as we thought. This month’s guest on A Deeper Look podcast, Dr. Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), incisively shines a light on the strengths and weaknesses in development work revealed by the pandemic.
Dr. Kanem is one of the great leaders on the international stage who speaks with moral clarity and forcefulness on sensitive issues of sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights. She discusses the many ways she and UNFPA are meeting this year’s extraordinary challenges and shares her views on the importance of continued progress on gender equality in the face of the issues presented by the global pandemic. Dr. Kanem sees this moment in history as an unexpected opportunity to engage a new generation in finding ways to address systemic barriers to gender equality and social equity.
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This week, more than 3,700 participants will gather in Kigali, Rwanda, for the fifth International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP). What is at stake? The lives and well-being of an estimated 214 million women of reproductive age in developing countries who want to avoid or delay pregnancy but are not using an effective form of modern contraception.
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The Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe women (DREAMS) partnership aspires to reduce HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women in 10 sub-Saharan African countries. These countries alone accounted for more than half of the HIV infections that occurred among adolescent girls and young women globally in 2015.
DREAMS reaches beyond the health sector to address the direct and indirect factors that increase girls’ HIV risk, such as poverty, gender inequality, sexual violence and inadequate education. Interventions can include paying school fees, providing bicycles to girls who would otherwise walk long distances to school, supplying sanitary napkins for menstrual hygiene management and offering mentoring to help girls avoid early pregnancy, gender-based violence and discrimination. DREAMS is supported by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Girl Effect, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences and ViiV Healthcare.
Two young women who participate in DREAMS projects attended FHI 360’s 2018 Gender 360 Summit and discussed how DREAMS is making a difference in their lives. Here are their stories.
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Keeping girls in school in Malawi means better health and a brighter future
An Interview with
Mary Mittochi, Project Director, DREAMS: Malawi Communities Investing in Education for Child Health and Safety, FHI 360
Photo: Ed Scholl/FHI 360
In this Q&A, Mary Mittochi, the project director for DREAMS: Malawi Communities Investing in Education for Child Health and Safety, discusses how this new project will reduce the acquisition of HIV by adolescent girls and boys. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) named FHI 360 as one of the winners of the DREAMS Innovation Challenge. The DREAMS partnership, led by PEPFAR with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Girl Effect, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences and ViiV Healthcare, is helping adolescent girls and young women become Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe.
As one of the 56 DREAMS Innovation Challenge winners, how will FHI 360 help adolescent girls and young women become Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe?
FHI 360’s DREAMS: Malawi Communities Investing in Education for Child Health and Safety project will focus on integrated, community-led efforts designed to ensure that education, health and economic drivers for staying in school and completing secondary education are simultaneously addressed and strengthened. Over time, this will reduce the incidence of HIV in adolescent girls and boys. By keeping girls in school and connecting them to a comprehensive range of services and supports, we aim to equip them and their communities with the knowledge and agency they need to make more informed choices about their health and their future. -
At FHI 360, we take a 360-degree perspective to addressing the most complex human development needs. We envision many pathways to girls’ and women’s economic empowerment — through education; training; access to resources; and the elimination of social, political and gender-related barriers.To increase equality between girls, boys, women and men, we believe that a gender perspective has to be integrated into every aspect of all development programs.
FHI 360 supports women and girls living in poverty, through cutting-edge interventions in health, nutrition, education and economic development interventions. Not only are we implementing some of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) flagship projects on HIV care, prevention and support — we are also working with multiple donors implementing girls’ education projects as a pathway out of poverty.
We are addressing women’s poverty in value chains, small and medium businesses, and micro-lending and savings and loan activities. Equally important, we work to engage men and boys as partners and agents of positive social change.
Why prioritize attention on women and girls? For FHI 360, it comes down to three simple reasons:
- It is the right thing to do.
- It improves project outcomes.
- FHI 360 has strong political will to do so at all levels of the organization.
We aim to impact in the short, medium and long term the lives of women and girls in many countries. We want to improve women’s and girls’ current access to resources, their economic empowerment, their levels of education and their resiliency in the face of hardship.
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Women and girls: Beyond 2015
Written by
We know what we can achieve.
And we know what needs to be done.
We know that improving access to family planning can reduce maternal and child mortality. Moreover, as long as women are unable to negotiate the number and spacing of their children, gains will be limited. We know that exclusive breastfeeding provides an infant the best start in life. Yet, evidence shows that a child born to a mother who has had access to quality education, especially secondary education, has a greater chance of surviving to see her fifth birthday than a child whose mother has no education. In countries around the world, we have reduced dramatically the incidence of HIV. Yet, gender violence and sexual exploitation will need to be addressed as part of the solution if we are to halt the spread of the disease.
Last week, the United Nations General Assembly debated the post-2015 agenda, and it has never been more clear that women and girls must be top of mind in the global development discussion. Only when we transform unequal gender norms will we be able to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. This means taking a broader approach than what we have done in the past by integrating gender concerns and putting women and girls front and center in every post-2015 priority.