Having access to education is something I have always taken for granted. I have been in school since I was four year old, starting in preschool. Every since then, I have always been in school. I went to elementary school, grade school, middle school, high school, and now college. Not continuing school was never an option for me, I was always going to go to school and get a higher education. Growing up, I always thought school was the biggest drag, I always hated having to do homework and study for tests. There were points as a child where I wanted to just drop out of school because it was so annoying and frivolous to me. However, as I got older, especially in highschool, I realized how lucky I was to get an good quality education, especially as a woman.
So here is the question: why are there more than 130 million girls out of school? Education is a key part of strategies to improve an individual’s well-being as well as a society’s economic and social development. In the Middle East and North Africa, access to education has improved dramatically over the years, especially the past few decades, and there have been encouraging trends in women’s education, but it is still now where it needs to be. The challenges still remain. Many people, especially women, are still excluded from education. Many women are enrolled in school but are not learning anything that prepares them for 21st century job markets.
There are many benefits of female education for women’s empowerment and gender equality are clearly very important:
- As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves.
- Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contribution to household and national income.
- Women’s increased wage earnings has had a positive effect on child on nutrition.
- Child of educated mothers are more likely to be enrolled in school and are known to have higher levels of education attainment.
- Educated women are more likely to be more politically active and better informed about their legal rights and how to actually use and exercise them.
Education’s Effects on Reproductive Choices and Employment
225 million women in developing countries are not able to plan their own families which then leads to the 74 million unplanned pregnancies and 36 million abortions every year. With this. education is the single most important determinant of both age at marriage as well as age at first giving birth. For example, those who had no education were married at eighteen and had their first child by twenty years old. Competitively, those who had a secondary education or higher education got married at the age of twenty-three and had their first baby at the age of twenty-five. This shows how women are more prepared to have children and get married when they are more prepared and ready for children. Educated women generally want and have smaller families as well as make better use of reproductive health. They are also more prepared with planning family information and services in achieving their desired family size. Because of this, educated women tend to have healthier families.
A reason that educated women are able to have smaller families is because they can know about contraception. Women who are more educated tend to know about wider range of methods and where to get these available methods. Also educated women are more likely to actually discuss and have a conversation with their husbands about what kind of family they want and how many children they would like to have. An important part of family planning and a woman’s ability to choose the number and timing of their births is key to the empowerment of women as not only mothers, but individuals and citizens. It is a sad reality that many women are not able to choose how they want to live and what kind of family they want. If we want to stop this and empower women, we need to give all women, especially in developing countries, a greater access to education. All women deserve the chance to make their own choices in life and that starts with knowing that they have these rights, and that will happen through education.
Poverty is the biggest factor on whether a girl can access education. While children from rich families will most likely attend all levels of basic education, children from poor families are less likely to attend school, and girls have an even smaller percentage of school attendance. So, there are many factors that can contribute to girls not being able to attend school but the biggest one is the lack of free education. One reason for the lack of free education is because governments do not have legal and policy frameworks in place to make free education a reality. With free education not being a reality, it adds a financial burden on families, whether it be in the form of school fees, uniforms, exam fees, or school education to name a few. International human rights law imposes obligations on states to ensure that no one impairs the right to education. There is global action to tackle poverty through sustainable development has focused on gender inequality and education. There have been movements to improve gender equality, quality education and women empowerment by achieving sustainable development and by adopting various goals, targets, and indicators that are aligned with human rights laws.
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