Female Literacy

A serious topic of the importance of educating the female is definitely not out of place considering that some 65 million girls around the world never see the inside of a classroom. And yet not educating them costs the world more than putting them through school.

Sadly, the world is not yet rushing to "sign up" to the challenge of educating girls, who lag consistently behind boys in access to education throughout the developing world. Scholarly studies and research projects have established what common sense might already have told us: that if you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.

It is obvious to see why?.The children of educated mothers consistently out-perform children with educated fathers and illiterate mothers.

A girl who has had more than six years of education is better equipped to seek and use medical and health care advice, to immunise her children, to be aware of sanitary practices from boiling water to the importance of washing hands. A World Bank project in Africa established that the children of women with just five years of school had a 40 per cent better survival rate than the children of women who had less than five years in class.

The health advantages of education extend beyond childbirth. The dreaded disease AIDS spreads twice as fast, a Zambian study shows, among uneducated girls than among those who have been to school. Educated girls marry later, and are less susceptible to abuse by older men. And educated women tend to have fewer children, space them more wisely and so look after them better; women with seven years' education, according to one study, had two or three fewer childen than women with no schooling.

The reason Kerala's fertility rate is 1.7 per couple while Bihar's is over four is that Kerala's women are educated and Bihar has only 23% of female literacy rate, one of the worst on the planet, added to the woes that we have an illiterate woman chief minister.

Certainly, there is no better answer. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it simply: "No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition, promote health, including the prevention of HIV/AIDS, and increase the chances of education for the next generation. Let us invest in women and girls."