Keeping Girls in School

We met this little girl during our visit to the Berga wetland project in Ethiopia. Her eyes enraptured all of us visiting that day. More than one of us spontaneously recalled the iconic cover of National Geographic with the young Afghan girl and her striking green eyes. This one was close on our heels the entire time but never uttered a word.

And it is for girls like her that I want to help this school and others like it get better sanitation facilities. So girls like her can stay in school past puberty.

It makes sense when you think about it, but one of the major reasons girls drop out of school at much higher rates than boys in this part of the world is the lack of private, sanitary toilet facilities. If girls do not have separate and passable facilities when they start menstruating, they stay at home at alarmingly high rates. Without any of the help of pads or tampons, going through this transition to womanhood in public without facilities is simply not something girls will or will be allowed to do.

And of course the negative ripple effects are enormous. Higher levels of education are connected to so many positive things for girls and women:

--higher income and economic opportunity;
--greater decision-making power within the household and the community;
--more resources invested in the health, education, and nutrition of her own children;
--more control over when and how many children to have, in part through higher usage of modern contraception; and
--smaller family sizes that typical enable greater investment in each child;

…and the list goes on and on.

So this vicious cycle is one that needs to be broken in places like Ethiopia where the facilities for schools need resources for so many things, including clean and private pit latrines. Just as the negative ripple effects can be so terrible, so too can the positive ripples of such minimal investment pay tremendous dividends in the lives of kids and especially girls like the one pictured here.