International Day of The Girl Child is celebrated annually on October 11. The day is meant to bring focus on the challenges and dangers the Girl child faces, the inequality faced by girls worldwide based upon their gender also to promote the enforcement of their human rights, promote their empowerment and celebrate the diversity of girls all over the world.
The issues this day aim to tackle include; Lack of Education of the Girl child, Child marriage, Lack of access to health care, Female Genital Mutilation, Equality, Access to services related to puberty and sexual health and Gender-based Violence.
In a debate that held in the UK in July, 2018 by the UK-funded Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters program, Experts said there are a myriad of ways that in which women and girls suffer more from the effects of climate change more than men. In parts of the world where grave gender inequality is already a norm, droughts, floods and other freak weather events mean women and girls are often among the last to receive help. Victims of child marriage and female genital mutilation have less access to a long list of resources during times of climate crises: education, information and land ownership among others.
How can this problem be fixed? Educating the Girl child.
A broad coalition of researchers, scientists, business leaders and policymakers came together for Project Drawdown in 2017. This was a multidisciplinary effort to identify the most substantive solutions to not just stop global warming, but to actually cause an annual decline — or “drawdown” — in the concentration of greenhouse gases released into our atmosphere.
The team looked at dozens of methods of minimizing carbon dioxide emissions, and in the end, they came up with a list of 80 immediate and practical measures along with 20 near-future concepts that can keep CO2 out of our atmosphere. What they did, basically was rank the 100 most powerful solutions to reversing global warming. Educating girls was number 6.
Rooftop solar panels are #10. Electric vehicles come in at #26. And educating girls ranks at #6.
Drawdown notes that an educated girl marries later and has fewer and healthier children. Lives longer and enjoys greater economic prosperity. Most importantly, in the context of global warming, an educated girl is equipped with the skills to withstand and overcome the shocks of extreme weather events and changing weather cycles.
Educating girls is one of the most cost-effective, high-impact ways for every nation on earth to fight the rising temperatures and atmospheric changes that threaten us all and not only is this fighting climate change, educating the Girl child will result in tremendous improvements in economic and social standards of living for everyone.
“When you educate a girl, you educate the world”.