More on women issue

More than 120 million children are not in school, the majority of them girls. Each additional year of schooling for girls results in a 5–10 percent decline in child deaths. For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20 percent and wages rise 20 percent.

Kofi Annan has said: “There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health — including helping to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”

Women and girls are trapped in a cycle of malnutrition, particularly in South Asia. By tradition, women eat last and least. They eat only the food that is leftover after the males have eaten. Often men and boys consume twice as many calories — even though women and girls do much of the heavy work. Girls in India are two-to-four times more likely to suffer from acute malnutrition than boys.

The vast majority of those living in hunger and poverty are women and girls. And when empowered, women are the key change agents to solve the problem. Studies show that 43 percent of the progress in reducing hunger from 1970 to 1995 was due to educating women, while improvements in food production only contributed 26 percent. Women are up to 15 times more likely than men to spend increases in income on family nutrition. Women grow the majority of food in the developing world, despite being almost entirely bypassed by aid programs.

Every day marks the needless death of 30,000 children under five. Half of these children die as a direct result of malnutrition, in which gender discrimination is a key factor. The other half die from lack of health care, in which there is also tremendous gender discrimination. Because boys are seen as an investment and girls are seen as a burden, poor families are up to seven times less likely to take their daughter to the doctor when she is sick than their son.

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