- Hi everyone.
I know it's the last session of the day,
so please bear with me
and hope you're still feeling inspired
and interested to hear some stories.
So I work in the development
team at Room to Read
and I'm here to talk to you today about
how education transforms communities,
educating girls especially
can transform communities.
So many of the world's problems
can be solved with one simple
solution and that's education.
But despite knowing the
benefits of education,
there's still 775 million
people in the world
who are illiterate
and that means they can't
read a single sentence.
Two thirds of those are women and girls.
So 62 million girls are
out of school today.
That means they've just not
getting any education at all.
And an educated girl is
likely to earn more money,
to have a smaller, healthier family
and to be able to improve
the quality of life
for her family, herself and
for her wider community.
So through our work in literacy,
we realized pretty early on
that although we were serving
primary school children,
so that was boys and girls,
that at secondary school level,
we really needed to
focus especially on girls
because in the communities where we work,
girls are dropping out as adolescents
at a much, much higher rate than boys.
And the reasons are many,
so it's things like cultural
bias, religion, teen pregnancy
and child marriage.
So in India, for example,
almost half of girls in India
are married before their 18th birthday.
So educating girls really needs to be more
than just academic coursework,
is a lot more complicated than that.
So I'm sure these women
need no introduction,
but just in case I'm gonna
go through a couple of them.
So we have Greta Thunberg,
who is a climate change teenage
environmental activists.
We have got Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
who is on the US Supreme Court.
And then we have Malala Yousafzai,
who is an activist, an education activist
and the world's youngest
Nobel Prize Laureate.
We also have Michelle
Obama, who is a lawyer.
She's a university administrator, a writer
and of course former
first lady of the U.S.
And we have Ada Lovelace, who was a writer
and the world's first computer programmer.
So there are many other women like this
who have completely changed
the course of history
because they were empowered
by their education,
through education.
And there are many, many, many more
whose potential never becomes realized
simply because they're girls
and they're denied their
access to education.
So we believe at Room to Read
that unlocking this hidden potential
is going to unlock human potential.
And just think of all of the problems
we could solve in the world if we had,
if we're really engaging
and educating all of the
people with those ideas
and those dreams that
solve problems like this.
So this is the future writers, educators,
nurses, doctors and maybe even presidents
and climate scientists
who are in school today.
So we believe that supporting girls
to finish secondary school
can completely change
their life's trajectory.
So how do we do it?
So it's a combination of
a few different things.
We really want to make sure
that they stay in school longer.
For every extra year a girl
stays in school, her income
or her potential income
increases from between 15 to 25%.
So every single year is super valuable
and we want them to
finish secondary school.
So we also wanna make sure
that they have the skills
and the agency to make
their own decisions.
And that's a really key important part
is giving these girls the driver's seat
so they can make their own choices
and they don't feel like other
people are deciding for them
what their life is going to be.
So a really key part of this
is the life skills and mentoring.
So we have mentors that
we call social mobilizers
and in essence, they're like super moms.
So they're there for emotional support,
they're there for guidance,
they help the girls with
things like negotiation,
like critical thinking.
They help them with things
like career planning,
figuring out who they are,
where they want to go,
what their strengths and weaknesses are
and what their opportunities
are in front of them
that they can have access to.
We also provide material support,
things like books and bicycles.
And that's really because
we just wanna make sure
there's no financial barrier
to these girls receiving the education
if it's something as simple
as an exam fee or a book,
we can really easily solve that problem
and make sure that they can get to school.
But the thing that I really
want to focus on today
and some of this has come up
through other discussions on communities,
is the only way for our
program to last long term
and for attitudes to gender
equality to actually change
is through community involvement
and to really make sure that
everybody in the community
is working together
with a shared goal.
They understand the
benefits of educating girls
and they feel a part of
the solution as well.
So it might be difficult to imagine,
but girls like Kamla from
India and Samirum from Nepal,
so badly wanted to go to school
that they actually went on hunger strike
until their fathers agreed
to let them stay in school.
And it's not just about their education,
these girls were just determined
and desperate to make their own choices
and to be able to design
their own destiny.
So when you educate a girl,
there is also a ripple effect.
It's not just about that one individual
who has the tools and the skills
and the knowledge necessary
to go and make their own life.
Women are actually improving
the lives of their families
and their communities as well.
And there's a whole host of benefits
that research keeps bearing out
is the benefit of educating girls.
So things like the reduction of child
and maternal mortality,
improvement of child nutrition and health,
lower birth rates, enhancement
of women's domestic role
and also their civic participation,
improvement of economic
growth and productivity.
Women usually put about
70% of their income
back into the home,
for men, it's a lot lower.
Protection of girls from HIV/AIDS
and from abuse and exploitation as well.
So educated women are much more likely
to make sure that their
children are also educated.
And this actually solves
the problem of illiteracy
in just one generation.
If you make sure a woman's educated,
her children are also gonna be educated
and then that's really how
you solve that problem.
The girls in our program,
for the most part,
are the first people in their
family to go to university
if they go and very, very often,
they're also the first to
even finish secondary school.
So there's a real lack of
role models there for them.
Our social mobilizers are role models,
but they might be the only
woman in that community
who has a university
degree or has a career.
And so our girls come
back to the community
and they end up becoming
those strong role models
for the younger girls to look up to.
And to tell you a little more about Kamla,
so after she went on her hunger strike,
she was allowed to go back to school,
her dad did not force her to get married.
And she decided that
she would like to become
a nursery teacher
because she felt very
passionate about education.
So she did that
and when she had a couple
of years under her belt,
she decided that she
wanted something bigger
and she went to Delhi to
really learn about education.
But in the time that she did that,
seven more girls in her region
decided to also become
nursery school teachers.
And that's simply because
a career that they had
never thought about,
never even knew existed
was finally open to them
because somebody else in
their community had shown them
this is an opportunity for you.
So you can really see the ripple effect
of educating one girl
and how they really become the role models
for the rest of the girls.
So building stronger communities
is really really important.
So when we work with a community,
it's not about Room to
Read coming in and saying,
hey, we have this really
cool girls education program,
we're gonna implement it here
and it's gonna solve all your problems.
That's not how it works.
We need to ask them,
what are your problems?
What are your challenges,
we need to contextualize
our program all of the time.
We do this by hiring local staff.
So in Sri Lanka, our staff are Sri Lankan,
Bangladesh, they're Bengali
and they work with the local community
and they really engage them and find out.
They want to make it an open space,
they engage them all of the time.
They keep them updated.
They let them know what the
next stage of the plan is.
They ask them what their challenges,
what their concerns are and
what can we do to help you.
And I think when you're
engaging communities like that,
they will actually tell you
what they need, if you listen.
So it's really about giving
them the space to communicate,
to be open and not to
feel afraid of telling you
what it is that they need
and that's how we really make it work.
And so when we leave these communities,
the attitude has changed
and those communities are starting to see
things differently
and of course, they're
having girls be successful
and they're all reaping the
benefits of that long term.
And it's really working.
So this is a picture of
Samirum who I mentioned earlier
and with her is her father
who has actually now become
her biggest champion.
So at first he wanted her to get married
and I don't know if you
can read that quote,
but he is 100% behind her education now
which is really amazing.
And this is Patima and her her father
who is determined to see
her go to university.
And this is Nandaram, who
has learned from Room to Read
the benefits of emotional support
so that he can help his daughter
to finish her secondary school as well.
And some of you might remember Regini
who I talked about last year.
After gaining confidence at school,
convinced her father to give up drinking
and restored a sense of calm in her home.
So the last story that I
want to talk to you about
is Kabita, which is a
really, really good example
of that ripple effect
and I'm actually just gonna
show you a short video.
- And just to give you a
little update on Kabita,
she recently was in Zurich giving a speech
and while she was there,
she got an email to say that
she's just been promoted.
So she's thriving, which
is really exciting to see.
And just a slight veer,
so I know we're talking about communities.
Communities can also be a
really great force for good.
So this is the Tech Bikers.
They have raised almost a
million dollars for Room to Read
by doing the thing that
they love, which is cycling.
So it's the tech community in Europe,
they put down their
laptops, pick up their bikes
and they do these really cool rides
from like Paris to London
or Amsterdam to Berlin
and raise money and awareness
for Room to Read every year.
And the reason they've been so successful
is because they've created
such an amazing community
that makes people wanna take part.
It's not all about Room to Read,
it's about the Tech
Biker community as well.
It's almost become a rite of passage
within the tech community
to take part in one of these rides.
They network with one
another, they talk about tech,
they talk about Room to Read,
they do this really cool
thing with each other
for two or three days.
And it's something that they never forget
and a lot of them do go on to
become Room to Read donors.
But they've gotten so much
more out of that experience
that has nothing to do with us.
And they're sharing their passions
and they're having a really
good time while they do it.
So yeah, I hope that this has given you
some food for thought
and just kind of tied
in some of the themes
that we've talked to
today about communities.
And I have to always share this photo
because it's the cutest one that we have.
So yeah, thank you very much
and hopefully see you all later on.
