We think you will agree that the following statistics about adolescent girls in the developing world are shocking.  Girls are the last to be educated in the developing world and are often forced to marry before the age of 18.  If we can continue to build schools for girls, marriage will be delayed, lives will be saved and ending poverty becomes a real possibility.  Educate a girl…and she will change the world.

Videos by The Girl Effect

                  

Child Marriage (click on the links for more information)

• If nothing changes, there will be 142 million child marriages in developing countries between now and 2020.  That’s 37,000 girls a day.
• One-third of girls in the developing world will be married before the age of 18.
• Child brides have a pregnancy death rate double that of women in their 20′s.

Economic Empowerment

• Closing the joblessness gap between girls and their male counterparts would yield an increase in GDP of up to 1.2 percent in a single year.
• Giving women the same access to non-land resources and services as men could increase yields on women’s land by up to 30 percent, raise total agricultural output in developing countries by up to four percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100-150 million.

Education

• On average, only 70 percent of girls with 28 hours or more per week of household chores attend school.  When that chore burden is reduced to less than 14 hours, 90 percent attend school.
• When a girl in the developing world receives seven years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.
• An extra year of primary school education boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10–20 percent.  An extra year of secondary school adds 15–25 percent.
• Secondary school completion rates for adolescent girls is below five percent in 19 sub-Saharan African countries.

Health & Safety

• Worldwide, an estimated five million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are living with HIV.  More than 60 percent – 3.2 million – of young people living with HIV are girls.
• Each year, an estimated three million girls experience genital mutilation or cutting.
• Half of all first births in the developing world are to adolescent girls.
• Girls between the ages of 10 and 14 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than women aged 20 to 24.
• If a mother is under the age of 18, her infant’s risk of dying in its first year of life is 60 percent greater than that of an infant born to a mother older than 19.