Educate Girls: The 2003
World Food Prize Laureate Lecture
Friday, October 16, 2003
Speaker: Catherine Bertini
______________________________________________________
The Honorable Catherine Bertini
United Nations Under Secretary General for Management
If someone told you that, with just 12 years of investment of
about $1 billion a year, you could, across the developing world,
increase economic growth, decrease infant mortality, increase
agricultural yields, improve maternal health, improve children’s
health and nutrition, increase the numbers of children — girls
and boys — in school, slow down population growth, increase the
number of men and women who can read and write, decrease the
spread of AIDS, add new people to the work force and be able to
improve their wages without pushing others out of the work force
– what would you say? Such a deal! What is it? How can I sign
up?
The answer is to educate girls. United Nations
Secretary General Kofi Annan says we know from study after study
that there is no tool for development more effective than the
education of girls and women. Let me share some of the reasons
why.
There was a study done by T. Paul Schultz at Yale
who said, “Increased schooling of mothers is associated with
larger improvements in child quality incomes than increase in
the education of the father. It has a larger beneficial impact
on the child’s health, on the child’s schooling, and on the
child’s future adult productivity.” Now, this is similar to what
the World Food Programme found out when we said we’re going to
end hunger; therefore we need to get food to women because
they’re the cooks.
Children in the developing world spend almost all
of their time with their mother, so why doesn’t it make more
sense that the adult that they spend the most time with is going
to have the most impact on them? If that person is educated, it
does have a lot of impact on the children.
For instance, in the areas of health, the
International Center for Research on Women says that if you
educate a girl for six years or more, it will always have a
positive effect on a woman’s use of prenatal care, postnatal
care and the use of experts in delivery.
UNICEF tells us that educated mothers immunize their
children 50% more than mothers who are not educated. UNESCO
tells us that just a primary school education can decrease child
mortality by 5-10%.
The same professor at Yale tells us that the heights
and weights of newborns are improved almost across the board for
women who have at least a basic education compared to those who
do not.
And the World Bank did a study in African countries
which says that five years of schooling of girls means a 40%
higher survival rate for their children than girls who have
babies who have not had that education.
The UN Population Agency tells us that uneducated
women are less likely to know that condom use prevents the
spread of HIV/AIDS, although they’re quick to point out that not
everybody who is educated knows that either.
And a Zambian study says that AIDS spreads twice as
fast among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some
schooling.
On population, UNESCO will tell us that if a girl is
educated for at least seven years, she has two or three less
children than her sister who is uneducated. Educated girls
generally start having babies later than uneducated girls. If
they marry later, even in their late teens, young women are more
likely to marry someone closer to their own age than a young
girl marrying somebody much older who perhaps has had a lot more
experiences than she has and is more likely to bring AIDS into
the family. Educated girls know about baby spacing and have
their children in less frequent intervals, usually, than those
who are uneducated.
The World Bank did a paper where they studied women
in one hundred different countries, and they estimated that for
every four years of education, future fertility drops by about
one birth per mother.
Looking at the economy, what does girls’ education
mean? Again, in the World Bank study of one hundred countries,
they wrote about women in secondary education, and the study
said in the one hundred countries in which they studied, for
every 1% increase in girls who have gone to secondary education,
there is an annual per capita income growth of .3%.
And, of course, it is well known that countries who
have organized their education systems so that there is relative
equality between girls and boys in access to education, have
grown faster economically in the last few decades than most
countries that have not.
IFPRI, the former home of Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a
World Food Prize Laureate, did studies about women in
agriculture. And you know that when we talk about agriculture,
we’re often talking about women working in agriculture. In
Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 90% of the people working in
processing food crops and providing water and fuel are women.
IFPRI tells us that better-educated farmers are more
likely to adopt new technologies and to have access to extension
workers. They write about a study in Kenya where they looked at
increased education of women and saw that those women were able
to plant coffee trees more readily and more productively. And
then they follow the phenomenon that other women farmers, even
if they weren’t so well-educated, followed the women that were.
And IFPRI said that women farmers are more likely to follow the
practices of other women farmers than they are the practices of
men. So IFPRI made the point, therefore, that underinvesting in
women has high opportunity costs, especially when the vast
majority of farmers are women.
And when we look at nutrition, we can look at
another study done by IFPRI in 63 countries. More productive
farming, due to an increase in women’s education, was directly
related to a 43% decline in malnutrition between the years 1970
and 1995.
And then there was an interesting study that the
World Bank reported on in its World Development Report, which
said in Guatemala you need 15 times as much spending to impact
improved child nutrition when income is earned by the father
rather than the mother. In other words, when the mother gets her
income, she more likely uses it for the benefit of the family
immediately, particularly in this case, for nutritional needs.
Another World Food Prize Laureate, Mohammed Yunus
tells a similar story. When he was starting the Grameen Bank,
he was asking potential customers of his bank to list the top
ten things they were going to do with their new income after
they got a loan and invested it in a business and then had more
income for their family. He said on the lists of ten things
that were made by potential male borrowers maybe somewhere at
the bottom of the list was something for their families. And if
you ask women the same question, when they listed the ten things
they were going to use their new income for, maybe somewhere on
the bottom of the list was something they were going to do for
themselves, because everything else was something they were
going to do for their families.
We saw this at World Food Programme over and over
again. Women in every region of the world have said to me,
“Please send food into my family, because if food comes into my
house, I manage it. I’m in charge of the food. But when cash
comes into my house, I don’t. I’m not in charge of the cash,
and it doesn’t necessarily go for food.” That doesn’t mean there
shouldn’t be cash in the house, but it means if our mission at
WFP was to end hunger, we had to direct food to women in an
effort to try to achieve that.
I’ll give you an example. One time I was in Latin
America, and I saw a program where an NGO had given a cow to a
family. And we talked to the woman who took care of that cow.
She milked it every morning, she brought it with her to the
fields where she worked in the fields all day while her toddler
children were running around in the fields. She brought that cow
back at night and milked it again. Each time after she milked
it, she brought the milk down to the co-op, as the other women
milking their cows had done. And she did this work day after day
after day. And then of course she prepared the food for the
family, took care of the children at home, and so forth. Once a
month it was time to go to the co-op to collect the money from
the milk. Guess who did that? Her husband. He owned the cow.
We have to remember not only to keep women in the
picture, but to do our best to educate them. When we were
working with WFP we saw the importance of educating children.
This audience understands this concept more than almost any
other audience. There are people here today that are feeding
children in the United States, feeding children throughout the
world, and you know that if a child has a meal at school, then
that child can learn more. They are less tardy, they are less
absent and they do better in tests. We know all of this from
schools in the U.S. It’s the same for schools all around the
world.
Children are the same. They need food to be able to
grow and to be able to develop. It’s the same issue everywhere.
And that’s why WFP for all of its years of existence has been
feeding children in school. It had a boost to that effort when
Ambassador, former Senator George McGovern and Senator Bob Dole
asked for additional resources for feeding children at school to
help support WFP and NGOs and others who were reaching out to
try to reach children to feed them in school.
Universal education for all children is a part of
the Education for All initiatives of the United Nations, a
program that we are all striving to try to achieve. There are
goals set to try to ensure that all children have at least basic
primary education by the year 2005 and secondary education by
2015.
We found at WFP that as we were working on feeding
children at school, we could also use food as an incentive to
get girls to school. There are some wonderful programs in WFP,
highlighted in areas where there are very few girls going to
school, where girls get take-home rations. If a girl comes to
school for a month, for instance, she gets to take home a liter
can of vegetable oil. That liter can of vegetable oil sometimes
is worth half her father’s monthly salary. It’s an incentive for
him to send her to school.
WFP does this in many different countries around the
world, and the lowest increase in attendance where they’ve
implemented it is a 50% increase. In Pakistan, in one community
there was a 247% increase in the number of girls in school
because of this incentive program.
When I visited a refugee camp in Iran where there
were Afghan refugees, WFP had started this program because
mostly the schools were filled with boys. The Iranians were
kindly hosting all the refugees and providing schools and basic
support services for the refugees. But they were complaining to
me, happily, that they were going to have to build a new school,
because since we had started this program, there was such a
great demand on the part of the girls who wanted to come to
school, that the children could not all fit in the existing
school.
WFP estimates that these kinds of programs cost 19
cents a day per beneficiary on the average. That includes
everything – transportation, management, food, everything. For
19 cents a day we can get girls in school.
As you’ve heard during the course of the conference,
there are the Millennium Development Goals now that the then
189-member states of the United Nations agreed to and that we
are all striving to achieve. Many of you know those goals quite
well.
Educating girls can make a major impact on six of
the eight goals: Eradicating extreme poverty and
hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender
equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality;
improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other
diseases.
If this is such a great idea, why don’t we do more
of it? As I said, it doesn’t cost very much. But if you ask the
major organizations who are involved in this – How much would it
cost? In this case, how much would it cost for universal
education through primary school for all children who are not
currently educated? What are the additional resources? – well,
using different estimates, UNICEF says $9 billion between now
and 2015, UNESCO says $11 billion, the World Bank says $13
billion.
So I come with my figure of a billion dollars a year
for the next twelve years. That would be the approximate cost to
be able to put money into programs in order to try to ensure
that every child has a basic education and to be able to put
some incentives together to try to get more girls in school.
The Millennium Development Goal people who have been
tracking this say that some countries are on a fast track but
that of the 124 countries for whom they have information, 25 are
off track; and major efforts need to be made by UN agencies,
nongovernmental organizations, and most importantly by the
governments themselves, to be able to build the local capacity
for those countries and all countries, to be able to be
providing primary school education and especially education for
girls.
Why is this such a problem for girls, we say. Of
course, you know sometimes in society it’s not as enticing to
send a girl to school as to send a boy to school. But perhaps if
people knew the economic difference that it made to send a girl
to school, and how much better off her children were going to
be, who are more likely to go to school, to get good nutrition,
to get good health care, perhaps there would be a higher
priority put on educating those girls.
Sometimes there are safety issues for girls getting
to school, physically getting to school. Sometimes there are
sanitation issues; some schools don’t have bathrooms, and
without them many parents would not want to send their girls to
school. So in some cases building a latrine at a school may be
all the difference between having a lot more girls come to
school than having very few come to school.
Some societies still want segregated education,
girls and boys, but there’s one schoolhouse, so maybe building
another schoolhouse, as the Iranians were doing for the
refugees, would make all the difference for more girls to come
to school.
And maybe incentive programs – we know incentive
programs like the World Food Programme offers - would make a
difference for girls to go to school. There’s been a lot of
progress. There are 65 countries that have made a lot of
progress on getting girls educated throughout their countries,
but there are still many more to go.
The Secretary General spoke about how important it
is for him, when he established a program for educating girls
throughout the world. He said, “No other policy is as likely to
raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal
mortality, improve nutrition, promote health, including the
prevention of HIV/AIDS, and increasing the chances of education
for the next generation. Let us invest in women and girls.”
As I did my work at WFP, I felt like there was
nothing more important than to educate girls, because educated
mothers can take more opportunities in the workplace. They do
have more opportunities because they can read and write, because
they can take advantage of economic opportunities that come
their way, and improve the economic well-being of their
families, their communities and their countries; because
educated girls know more about taking care of their health and
that of their children and of the right kind of nutrition for
themselves and their children; and because those girls that are
educated make their own decisions that are sometimes, often
different, from their uneducated sisters, about the size of
their families and how to take care of those families when they
have them; because educated girls who grow up to be educated
women can be more productive in agriculture and more productive
in their own communities as well.
That’s why, when Ambassador Quinn called and told me
that I would win the World Food Prize (by the way, I was
speechless on the phone when he called), and Tom and I talked
about what would be the best thing to do with the prize, and we
thought that I didn’t earn this prize because of my great
scientific research or of my brilliant intellectual abilities. I
was given the prize because I led the World Food Programme and
because we accomplished a lot of great things. So to us it made
sense that the generous prize money should be donated for the
same purpose.
So I have contacted the Friends of the World Food
Programme, which is the charitable organization in the U.S.
which supports the World Food Programme, and told them that I
would like to give the $250,000 award to the Friends of the
World Food Programme and ask them to set up a trust for the
specific purpose of supporting programs for education of girls
and literacy for women.
I believe it is the best payoff possible in the
world to contribute to this important agenda, to educate girls
and provide literacy training for women; because there is no
other policy where such a limited amount of resources can have
such a maximum impact on poverty and hunger throughout the
world.
I believe if we want to change the world, and we all
do, there is one way to do that – educate girls.
