By Eleonore Meyer
Together with the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, the London-based Maplecroft has launched the first online resource that spotlights plight of 600 million teenager girls around the world.
The new online project, Girls Discovered, collates and maps data highlighting the vulnerability of adolescent girls the world over. One of the key findings of Girls Discovered is that there is a scarcity of data on girls aged 10-14 years, a critical juncture in a girl’s life.
Data sources include UNESCO, UNICEF, UNAIDS, Demographic and Health Surveys, Population Council, WHO, World Bank, International Labour Organisation and Maplecroft’s own global risk indices.
Girls Discovered also addresses the impact of climate change on the lives of adolescent girls. Drought, for instance, affects women and girls the most by increasing their chore burdens (time spent collecting water, food and fuel).
“Adolescent girls in the developing world remain invisible and uncounted. These girl-specific statistics are a tremendous step toward ensuring that girls are visible and tracked,ö said Lisa MacCallum, Managing Director of the Nike Foundation that together with the United Nations Foundation set up the Coalition in 2005.
The Coalition has been joined by more than 30 leading international organizations, including its founding members, International Center for Research on Women, the Population Council and the International Women’s Health Coalition.
This public-private partnership aims at bringing fresh perspectives, diverse resources and concrete solutions to the challenges facing adolescent girls in developing countries.
“It is our hope that this quantitative analysis will move people to action -- to better understand adolescent girls’ reality and to promote and invest in them having a better future,ö said MacCallum.
According to Alyson Warhurst, Founding Director of Maplecroft and a professor at Warwick Business School, “It is time we focused on girls. The welfare of adolescent girls is crucial for the economic and social progress of countries in the developing world. An extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls' future wages by 10 to 20 percent, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15 to 25 percent.
“The size of a country's economy is in no small part determined by the education and skill sets of its girls. At present only 0.5 percent of official development assistance goes to girls.ö
A unique feature of the site is the Girls Vulnerability Index, which uses sub-national data on India to identify hotspots of vulnerability across the country’s 28 states. The index found that girls in Nagaland, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Manipur are the most vulnerable across a spectrum of issues relating to their health and wellbeing, education, economic opportunities and chore burdens.
Girls Discovered tells the story of Sunita, born in the state of Orissa: Like one in five girls in India, Sunita’s birth was not registered. Of those girls whose births are registered, only two in five possess their birth certificate.
SUNITA’S STORY
When she is five years old, Sunita is enrolled in primary school. Primary school enrolment is high in India. Only four percent of girls between the ages of 6 and 11 are not enrolled in primary school. Like one in every five Indian girls aged between 5 and 14 years, Sunita usually spends between 11 and 20 hours per week doing chores and other unpaid work for her family, leaving little time for homework.
Sunita struggles to keep up with the rest of her class. Teacher absenteeism exacerbates her poor progress. Like 50 percent of Indian girls, Sunita enrolls in secondary school. But, as an Orissan girl of her income level, it is unlikely Sunita would continue with her education beyond a year or two at secondary school.
When she is fourteen, Sunita drops out of school. Nearly 60 percent of Indian girls between the ages of 6 and 16 years drop out of school, although in some states the drop out rate is much higher. It is too expensive for Sunita’s family to keep her in school. Sunita has only basic literacy, in a country where the average literacy rate among girls aged between 15 and 24 years is 64 percent.
When she is 19 years old, Sunita gets married. Sunita is lucky compared to some girls, as one in eight girls in India is married before age 15. Soon after getting married, Sunita has her first child. Across India, one in eleven girls aged between 15-19 years has had a child.
Like half of all births to girls aged 15-24 years in India, there is no skilled birth attendant helping Sunita when she has her first child. Luckily, both mother and child survived.
After the birth of her child Sunita returns to work as a seasonal farm laborer and spends her spare time doing household chores. Like nine out of every ten Indian young women aged between 20 and 24 years, Sunita doesn’t have a bank or savings account.
Despite being paid a wage for her work, Sunita doesn’t get to decide how to spend the money she earns. This is common in India, where over 25 percent of young women aged between 20 and 24 years are not in control of the money that they earn.
Frustrated that her laborer wages aren’t covering the costs of her growing family, Sunita would like to start a roadside tea business -- but she has no capital. Accessing loans and credit is difficult, and less than nine percent of women in the state of Orissa succeed.
Across the country as a whole, just one in 24 young women aged between 20 and 24 years has access to loans and credit.
Now at 23, after having her fourth child, Sunita is starting to use contraception with her husband. Only one in nearly eight young women between the ages of 20 and 24 years in India is using any type of contraception.
Sunita’s daughter is 5 and enrolled in primary school. In 9 years, Sunita will pull her out of secondary school, lacking the funds to pave a different path for her daughters.
So that this does not happen, Girls Discovered pleads for help to break the cycle of vulnerability.
- IDN-InDepthNews Service | GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES |
