By Gil Lima | Project Manager
All across the world girls are standing up as never before. They are demanding to be free. Free to pursue their hopes and dreams, and free to live the life they choose to build for themselves. Their courage and their power is what this report is about – and what those who benefit from the silence of girls fear most.
With empowerment and the right support girls can change the world. Many of them are already doing just that.
Girls like Malala. Girls who have stood up at great personal risk and who are asking us to stand with them.
Malala is far from alone in facing terrible danger because of her power as a girl. The kidnapping of the Chibok girls in northern Nigeria and the sexual enslavement of Yazidi girls in Iraq are motivated by the same pernicious notion – that girls should not be free to learn or to make decisions about their lives. Other girls – such as those who have been trafficked across the Mediterranean, or who are forced to live in a brothel in Bangladesh – are subject to the most extreme violations of their rights because of another noxious idea: that girls are tradable commodities.
Save the Children’s Every Last Child campaign is fighting to change how the world thinks about – and tackles – the exclusion millions of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged children face. Standing up for every last girl is at the heart of our campaign. Everybody the world over must recognize that girls are nobody’s property and nobody’s victims. Rather girls are the most powerful catalysts for a different world.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed in 2015 by the international community, are our starting point. In addition to gender equality and girls’ and women’s empowerment being recognized as a goal in their own right, it is increasingly understood that achieving progress for girls and women is vital to unlock achievement in many of the goals. A leading predictor of a country’s improved health outcomes, for example, is girls’ secondary school completion. Supporting girls to be agents of change is at the heart of the sustainable development agenda.
By Gil Lima | Project Leader
By Negin Janati | Director of Humanitarian Response
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