The Key to Eliminating Poverty

This is an English version of the report I posted before this. It's a subject I feel strongly about so I wanted to write an intensive study!

Is Empowering Women the Key to Ending Poverty?

Recent Studies Show the Reaching Benefits of Educating Women and Girls in Developing Countries

        

Senna was born in Rinconada, Peru into a town that is the highest human habitation in the world. But this girl born on top of the world had prospects that could not have been lower. Her father was a miner, paid barely anything to desperately dig downwards, hoping for a small glint of gold. After getting in a mining accident, her father left work, too devastated and frightened to continue spending his life buried away from the sun. Every day, Senna would walk past streets full of brothels in her impoverished neighborhood and clean the public toilets at the end of the street.

Although this story may sound astonishing to someone growing up in a wealthy western society, Senna’s situation is anything but rare. Poverty is a consistent and widespread issue plaguing our planet, with at least 80% of humanity living on less than 10 euro a day (global issues.org). Extreme poverty such as that leads to a plethora of other issues that affect not only the neighborhoods and countries that are particularly impoverished, but the entire world (poverties.org).

It is extraordinarily difficult to break the cycle of poverty. Hoy en día, the majority of people born into poverty still stay in poverty (cnnmoney). But in recent years we’ve seen a new trend which many experts refer to as the “feminization of poverty” (un women). This phrase refers to the phenomenon that the majority of the people living in poverty are women. The most recent UN data reported that 70% of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty worldwide are women (iwpr.org). Women, on average, earn about 50% of what men earn (un women). Study after study proves that many more women are affected by poverty than men.

Not only are more women affected by poverty, but the consequences of that poverty can be much more detrimental. The many women and girls living poverty become caught in a cycle then lack the necessary means to break that cycle. Due to gender roles, many are denied resources such as inheritance, legal rights, land and credit. Much of their labor and efforts go without recognition and compensation. The specific medical needs for women are not given priority in a lot of developing countries so many women, specifically mothers, suffer from preventable medical issues simply because they have no way to get care. Strict gender roles also have more disturbing consequences. For example, the number one cause of death worldwide for women ages 15-19 is childbirth, and 75% of AIDs cases are women and girls. Poverty comes with many horrible and wide-reaching effects for both men and women, but poverty coupled with gender oppression creates consequences that are harmful, permanent, and even fatal.

An area in which the effects of this poverty are particularly staggering is education. 33 million fewer girls than boys are in primary school worldwide. When a family is struggling to pay for education, they tend to prioritize the education of their sons over the education of their daughters. Women also drop out of school in many countries due to early pregnancy or being married off when they are young. Some parents keep their daughters home from school due to religious qualms. Whatever the reason, in developing countries there is still a major gender gap when it comes to education.

 

With such widespread problems when it comes to poverty, what sort of solutions could there be? Many sociologists in recent years saw that poverty is a greater issue for many women than men and asked, if those women were empowered and educated, what effect would that have on poverty?

The results of the many studies that happened in response to this question offered a staggering clear answer. They have consistently come to the conclusion that the fastest and most effective way to combat poverty is to empower and educate women and girls. It is considered one of the highest return investments in the developing world.

How does empowering women break the cycle of poverty? It starts on a smaller scale. If a girl spends more years in school it is shown that those years of schooling will keep her safe and improve her health. For example, girls with just eight years of education are four times less likely to be married as children, and putting every child in school could prevent 700,000 HIV cases every year. Strong, healthy, safe and educated women tend to raise children who are strong, healthy, safe and educated as well. A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to survive past the age of five. Educated mothers are also twice as likely to send their own children to school after them. All of these differences would affect the lives of those empowered women and their children immensely. But it would not only affect their lives, it would save their lives.

Those are the differences that educating and empowering women makes on an individual level, but the benefits of empowerment do not stop there. Women operate the majority of farms and small businesses in the developing world. If these women are empowered and educated, they make better leaders and better businesswomen. That means they create more jobs, make more money, and spend more money. This would not only show results for women and girls, it would change the entire society of which they are a part. Educated girls are powerful force for social change. Women and girls who are given confidence and resources give back to the world in countless ways. Take India for example. Compared to many other countries, India is a poor and overpopulated nation. Many parts of India have strict gender roles and a massive gender gap in education. However, if this country enrolled just 1% more girls in secondary school, the GDP of the entire nation would rise by 5.5 billion dollars. Many other developing countries would see similarly dramatic effects. And once those developing countries start breaking and ending the cycle of poverty, we will live in a better world.

 

Senna, the Peruvian girl who once washed toilets so she had enough money to eat, started realizing that when she looked at the coins she was given as a paycheck she could add them in her head faster than her boss could do so with his calculator. When she told her father, he told her that one day she would be an engineer. He insisted that she stay in school, despite their compromising circumstances. When he father became ill and passed away, Senna started reading poetry. She claimed that she began to see herself as a brave warrior, and she learned that words can make for mighty weapons. She became empowered by words, memorizing poetry and writing poetry and even performing in front of audiences in competitions.  She says now that she will be the engineer her father always wanted her to be and she will be a poet. “I know now that the fortune my father sought so haplessly was always buried in me. It was just a matter of finding it.”

Works Cited

"About Poverty." Institute for Women's Policy Research. Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2010. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.iwpr.org/initiatives/poverty>.

Arana, María, screenwriter. Girl Rising. Dir. Richard E. Robbins. The Documentary Group, 2014. Film.

"Causes & Effects of Poverty On Society, Children & Violence." Poverties.org. Creative Commons License, May 2013. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.poverties.org/effects-of-poverty.html>.

"The Feminization of Poverty." UN Women. United Nations, May 2000. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/followup/session/presskit/fs1.htm>.

Hargreaves, Steve. "Making it into the middle class." CNN Money. Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company., 13 Nov. 2013. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://economy.money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/making-it-into-the-middle-class/>.

Howard, Jacqueline. "Empowering Women And Girls Is The Key To Ending Poverty, And Here Are Numbers To Prove It." Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com Inc., 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.

R., C. "Making room for girls." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper Limited, 5 Nov. 2013. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/11/gender-inequality>.

Shah, Anup. "Poverty Facts and Stats." Global Issues. N.p., 7 Jan. 2013. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats#src1>.

"State Policy." The PEW Charitable Trusts. The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2015. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/topics/state-policy>.

Wodon, Quentin. "Reducing the Gender Gap in Education." The World Bank. The World Bank Group, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/reducing-gender-gap-education>.

"Women in national parliaments." IPU. N.p., 1 June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015. <http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm>.

 

 

Reviews

[MOON]

Lovely write deep , thought provoking. Reading this on women's day here.