Empowering girls is about rights, not just economics

Empowering girls is about rights, not just economics


It is only through championing a rights argument that we can make a sustained and effective effort for girls and women


Indian schoolgirls wear masks of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old who was shot in Pakistan during a campaign for better budgetary allocation for education. Photograph: Altaf Qadri/AP

It has become a fashionable consensus that in the empowerment of adolescent girls and women lies the great panacea of development.

While Lady Thatcher famously argued that "nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus", it could be argued that in this case, nothing is more right. But although I'll yield to no one in my belief in the power and potential of girls and young women, it is sometimes helpful – when such consensus exists – to consider, or reconsider, why we all feel so strongly.
Empowering adolescent girls with education is seen, rightly, as a prerequisite to development and growth. Put a girl through school and she is less likely to marry early and have children before she is ready. Economically, that means healthier, more productive families and greater earnings potential.

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While the economic arguments for investing in girls are compelling, this is a narrow articulation of empowerment that fails to recognise wider concerns around transforming unequal power relations between the sexes. By all means look at gender inequality through the prism of economics, but let's not forget this is a question, first and foremost, of rights. In many parts of the world, traditional relations between the sexes systematically disadvantage girls throughout their lives, placing a lower value on them, thereby denying and violating their rights. At Plan we see this every day, from the girl sold off to early marriage in Bangladesh to the survivor of female genital mutilation in Mali to the girl kept from school under threat of violence in Pakistan.

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Our rights are inalienable, universal and permanent. Economic models, on the other hand, are shifting, nuanced and subject to interpretation. And so justifying investment in girls and women with economic arguments alone carries a risk: if the economic rationale for empowering girls is trumped by a more effective means to growth, what happens to girls?

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So yes, let's fight for girls' education, for better access to sexual health services and for lives lived without fear of violence and abuse – but let's not do it just because it's the smart thing to do, but because it is the right thing to do.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jan/25/empowering-girls-rights-economics