The Girl Effect
Jun 4th, 2008 by Dave
Came across an article the other day on CNBC about “The Girl Effect” (Peter Buffett Teams With Nike for $100M Investment in the “Girl Effect”) and it seemed oddly familiar.
What is “The Girl Effect”?
The Nike Foundation describes it in a news release (pdf) as “the powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society.”
“In impoverished communities, lack of resources drives girls out of school and into early marriage, childbirth, and HIV infection at rates dramatically higher than boys. The results are irreversible for girls, and devastating to communities caught in intergenerational cycles of poverty. Yet when girls gain a different path - supported, educated and empowered - everyone benefits.”
The reason it was familiar to me was that years ago Mom worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Arab World to collect data on this very phenomenon.
Statistics for a long time have shown that the best investment a country can make (in terms of improving its social indicators) is increasing girls’ enrollments.
But the word “empowerment” has negative connotations when translated in some of these regions; for these “empowerment” programs to be effective you need to understand the local cultures to get the support of the population.