Effective Tool For Creating Sustainable

HAVE YOUR HEARD? Educating girls is the single most effective tool for creating sustainable change Why Girls? Educating girls is a PROACTIVE solution With education, girls can make good choices before they are locked into the cycle of poverty

LIKE WHAT?  For every extra year of school she completes, she delays her choice to marry by 5 years.  She has fewer children and her children are more likely to go to school  for every year of schooling, infant mortality declines by 5–10% and she is much more likely to have her children immunized  HIV infection rates for girls are cut in half  In Kenya, providing girls one extra year of education beyond the average boosts their eventual wages by 30%

One Girl’s Life in Kenya in 2009 This is Sylvia Mmasi, Her mom and her five brothers and sisters live in a tiny mud walled house with no electricity. Sylvia’s dad died of AIDS a few years ago, and the family’s sole source of income is from the sale of “changa”, a potent and illegal home brew her mom makes and Sylvia sells when she isn’t at school. Inebriated customers coming and going at all hours and the lack of fuel for the lantern make it pretty difficult for Sylvia to complete her homework. In spite of this, academically Sylvia is ranked 10th out of 127 students in her class. Ironically, Sylvia is one of the luckier girls in Kakamega.

Challenges most girls in rural Kenya face • By the time Kenyan girls are 19 years old, 23% are pregnant with their first child or are already mothers. Thus, about half of the girls who have sex by age 18 get pregnant in the first year: that’s a quarter of all Kenyan girls. • Due to lack of reproductive education, these girls don’t have any knowledge about the transmission of HIV, resulting in a high rate of infection for girls under age 29; • • •

*By Age 15-19 3% girls are HIV positive *By Age 20-24 9% young women HV positive *By Age 25-29 13% women are HIV positive

• Girls in Kenya a 5 TIMES more likely to be HIV postive than boys.

Clinton Initiative laments dismal aid for girls NEW YORK, Sept 23,2009 (Reuters) –Women and girls remain largely ignored by development aid around the world with girls receiving only one cent of every dollar, leaders at the Clinton Global Initiative said on Wednesday. “Even though women make up half the world's population, they do two-thirds of

the world's work, produce 50 percent of the world's food, earn 10 percent of the world's income and own one percent of the world's property”, said former U.S. President Bill Clinton at his annual philanthropic summit.

"Whether the issue is improving the involvement of young women and girls in education to climate change and all political and social economic issues in between, I think empowering women is central to what the world has to do in the 21st century," Clinton said.