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I want to go to school
*This article was submitted by A-D Lu
One of the Millennium Development Goals is to promote gender equality and empower women. As I checked the UN website on the MDGs, there they were those familiar headlines such as 'Girls still wait for equal primary school access', or 'Targeted action is needed to help girls from poor, rural areas stay in school'. But there were also encouraging news, for example the one out of Rwanda where, in the last election, the new constitution guarantees 30% of parliamentary seats to women.
The greatest news of all is that girls in some countries now take action into their own hands and demand greater access to education. For example, through the support of UNICEF, girls in India demanded that schools be located closer to home, with functioning toilets and meaningful learning programs. In Madagascar, girl-to-girl strategy pairs a little sister (first grade girls who are at risk of dropping out) with a big sister from fourth and fifth grades so that the younger girl can get support from the older girl and stay in school. And then there was the story of six-year old Clarissa of Benin, who persisted in asking her mother to let her go to school until the day her mother decided to borrow money for her to go to school. According to the World Bank, for every 100 boys out of school, there are 122 girls. As so elegantly put by Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, if you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
Today, in 2009, we must have more reasons to hope than before. Must it be to support women entrepreneurship in rural areas, raise public awareness to reduce girls' domestic responsibilities, or support awareness campaigns to prevent violence against women and girls, we can all take that one step further. ... more
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This article has 1 responses.
1. L.W.R.Wickramasinghe from Sri lanka wrote:
Rationale and Justification of the Project. Given here below is a brief excerpt from the project proposal which is annexed, explaining the rationale and the justification of the project. (For the full text please refer to the annex 01 Mothers Education Project Proposal)
When it comes to literacy rate, though Sri Lanka is considered to have a very high overall literacy rate of 91.5%, whether this is true in a practical sense is doubtful due to many reasons. One reason being the definition of literacy itself, if considered as the ability to write their own name, though the percentage of people who could successfully do it may be high, it may not reflect their true writing and reading skills which could be considered as 'functional literacy'. There is no doubt that the functional literacy rate is well below the recorded rates. In addition to this, disparities exist in different geographical locations which have varying levels of development, as well as different communities.