Let Girls Learn is a new U.S. government initiative aiming to help young girls across the globe receive an education. It recruits Peace Corps Volunteers—American volunteers who spend two years in developing countries addressing such issues as health care, infrastructure, agriculture and education—to work on community-centered projects around the world. These projects are designed to facilitate adolescent girls’ access to educational opportunities with direct help from federal funds. They consist of things like girls’ leadership camps and mentoring programs.

The Let Girls Learn initiative was inspired by a 2013 meeting with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager whose powerful activism for girls’ education recently won her a Nobel Peace Prize. With approximately 62 million girls out of school around the world, and educational access growing scarcer for older girls, the government initiative is aiming to help adolescent girls receive the education they deserve.

An important way that Let Girls Learn is improving girls’ educational access is by combating early marriage and child pregnancy. In the developing world, one out of seven girls are married before the age of 15. Early marriage and childbirth too often signal the end of an adolescent girl’s education. However, girls who have received secondary school training are up to six times less likely to marry at a young age compared to girls who have not received such schooling.

In keeping with the Let Girls Learn initiative, USAID campaigns like the Advancing Youth Project and Best Schools for Girls are helping individual girls in countries like Bangladesh and Liberia overcome obstacles that would otherwise hinder their schooling. USAID encourages students, parents, educators and government officials in communities with high child marriage rates to encourage community-wide pledges against child marriage, and to discourage students from dropping out of school in order to marry. The organization has also developed a mobile tool that helps girls acquire English language skills as a means of improving their employment opportunities within the garment sector, which employs more than 4 million people in Bangladesh—90 percent of whom are women.

First Lady Michelle Obama recently embarked on a five-day journey in Asia, without the president or her daughters, to promote the global education initiative. In Japan, she joined Mrs. Akie Abe, the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in order to formally announce the partnership between the United States and Japan in promoting girls’ education throughout the world. The partnership is between the U.S. Peace Corps and Japan’s International Cooperation Agency. In Tokyo, the first lady described the problem as “truly a crisis” and cited attitudes toward women as a heavily contributing factor to the worldwide failure to educate young girls. She also traveled to Cambodia, where she met with a number of Peace Corps volunteers who are currently working on projects meant to increase girls’ educational access, and visited a special school that is encouraging notable progress.

Mrs. Obama plans to ask leaders in other countries around the world to stand up for the Let Girls Learn initiative, fostering an international environment that will ultimately prove more support for girls’ educational and personal successes.

– Shenel Ozisik

Sources: Bloomberg, NBC News, USAID
Photo: JetMag