To the Editor:
This summer, I visited Bangladesh, the country where my parents grew up, for the first time in six years. When we visited the small village where my father grew up and my grandparents still live, my grandmother told us stories about the immense poverty in which most of her neighbors were living, including the story of one man whose wife was very ill. My grandmother vividly described how she could often hear the man’s children crying from their house because of how hungry they were and how sick their mother was. Even though my grandmother had given the man money multiple times so he could feed his children and take his wife to a doctor, the wife eventually succumbed to her illness and died.
The story that my grandmother told me is not specific to Bangladesh. In a recent New York Times piece, Nicholas Kristof recalls an encounter he had in Myanmar with a 20-year-old woman named Sajan who dropped out of school at age 10 and was married off by her family for the bridal price of one cow. There are millions of people around the world who still face great inequality, and the characteristic that many of these people have in common is that they are female. Sheryl WuDunn, the award-winning journalist and co-author of Half the Sky, asserted that “the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity.” In Half the Sky, WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof state that there are currently between 60 million to 100 million missing females in the world. In India, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys from ages one to five. As WuDunn stated in her TED talk, “these women have three strikes
against them – they are poor, they are rural and they are female.”
We’ve all heard the saying that when you educate a girl, you educate a nation. But what does that really mean? Well, when you dismiss the moral and ethical reasons for gender equality and look at the issue from a purely practical standpoint, the best way to combat global poverty is to invest in the education of girls. As Lawrence Summers said in 1992, investing in “girls’ education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world.”
After my trip to Bangladesh, I began thinking about the millions of
women all over the world who have the same – if not greater – talent, drive, and ambition as I do. Yet, here I am, sitting in my heated room and preparing for my future, while there are girls around the world who are struggling to survive. While many factors have gotten me to where I am today, one of the main reasons why I am able to go to school and lead a healthy life is the lottery of birth. I am so lucky to have been born and raised in a country that has given me the opportunity to follow my dreams, and with that opportunity comes great responsibility to help improve the lives of girls and boys around the world who are not as fortunate as I am. I know that I cannot completely eradicate global inequality and injustice, but if I can even only help one child follow his or her dreams, that will be enough for me.
Celia Islam
Vienna