Julia Gillard: education is the key to global equality for women

Former Prime Minister of Australia and women’s rights activist Julia Gillard has made a plea for the millions of girls around the world without access to a quality education. Writing in a piece for The Guardian in celebration of International Women’s Day Gilliard makes the case for education as the way to enact global equality for women.

Progress has made, the number of girls globally who do not receive education has dropped by 40% since the year 2000. Though there are still more than 130 million girls who don’t have access to schools and unless something is done they will end up joining the more than 500 million illiterate women across the world – a number that makes up more than two-thirds of all illiterate adults.

“Without the ability to read, write and do basic math, most of these women will live in extreme poverty and hardship, unable to govern their own destinies or live out their full potential in life,” Gillard argues.

She talks about the abductions made in north-eastern Nigeria by Boko Haram, who take girls away from schools and either sell them into slavery or force them to become child brides.

There are other threats to these girls schooling too: social structures which prioritise boy’s education, dangerous treks to schools, threats of sexual abuse or violence, lack of menstruation facilities, lack of female teachers.

Educating girls can help set them free from the trap of poverty, Gilliard argues. The vice president of Gambia echoed these statements in an address to the Global Partnership for Education’s Financing Conference in Senegal. Fatoumata Jallow-Tamajang was a child bride herself, forced to marry and have a baby at 16, she later went on to earn a university degree and become a prominent women’s rights advocate. She said at the conference: “educating a girl is educating a nation because the bedrock of a society is a woman.”

Read Julia Gillard’s full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/we-cant-own-girls-we-owe-them

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