Blog by Evelyne Para, SI UN Representative at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Every year, all over the world, we celebrate International Day of the Girl in accordance with Resolution 66/170 adopted in 2011 by the United Nations General Assembly. This day, 11 October, is an opportunity to support the fundamental rights of girls, and to support them by taking up the particular challenges that they face.

Today, 130 million girls are still out of school. Nine million of them – compared to 3 million boys – will never enter a classroom. Each year, 12 million underage girls are forced to marry and more than 15 million adolescent girls are subjected to physical and psychological violence (excisions, rapes, early pregnancies), not to mention the 116 million young girls who work in all illegality.

It is tens of millions of shattered lives, destroyed destinies, and a world without so many promises; girls and young women who will not find their lost childhood. Often silenced within their community or even their family, they cannot change the course of their lives.

That is why, together with all other NGOs and civil society organisations, we call for the fulfilment of commitments made by UN Member States. We want to continue to make the voices of girls around the world heard, to help them overcome obstacles and build a better future for themselves.

Several commitments have been made at international level in favour of girls. In 1989, the International Convention on the Rights of the Child defined the fundamental rights of the child: the right to equality, to health, to education and leisure, to a justice adapted to their age, but also the right to be protected against all forms of violence, against all forms of exploitation and discrimination, the right to be protected in times of war, the right to speak out and to be heard on issues that concern them.

In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women made history with the adoption of Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most visionary political agenda for the empowerment of women and girls.

After two years of negotiations, in 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) making up the 2030 Agenda. Girls are one of the specific targets of SDGs 4 and 5, which constitute a cross-cutting basis for all the other goals.

In 2020, during one of his recent interventions at the UN, António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, affirmed:

“We must defend the equal rights, the voice and the influence of girls in our families, our communities and our nations. Girls can be powerful agents of change, and nothing should prevent them from fully participating in all walks of life”.

Over the past decade, progress has been made. For example, the number of out-of-school girls fell by 40%, whilst the proportion of young women married before the age of 18 fell by 15%, from one in four girls (or 25%), to around one in five (or 21%).

However, this progress is very uneven and slow. Many commitments made in favour of girls have still not been honoured. Girls are increasingly faced with the spectre of exclusion in education, and no country is on track to achieve the SDG of gender equality by 2030. Poverty is one of the many factors that promote early marriages and one of the main reasons why girls are out of school.

Other factors also hinder girls’ access to education, to their empowerment, and their well-being: the socio-cultural factors which still limit girls to their future role as wife and mother, the opportunity costs of schooling for girls in some countries where they execute more household chores than boys (such as collecting firewood, fetching water or looking after their younger brothers and sisters), the lack of suitable infrastructures (for example, insufficient number of separate toilets for girls and boys in schools), insufficient number of female teachers (in Yemen, 28% of school dropout cases among girls are the result of a decision by their father, motivated by the refusal to let men teach girls), violence suffered by girls at school, or on their way to school.

The global health crisis of COVID-19 could wipe out untold potential, undermine decades of progress and exacerbate deep-seated inequalities. According to UNESCO, there are 23 million children, adolescents and young people worldwide from pre-primary to higher education, who are at risk of not going back to school in 2020, and among them 11 million girls and young women.

This is why UNESCO and members of the Global Education Coalition’s Gender Flagship are launching a new #LearningNeverStops campaign focusing on keeping girls in the picture.  This global campaign calls for preserving the progress made in girls’ education, ensuring continuity of girls’ learning during school closings and promoting back to school girls, safely, when schools reopen.

Let us continue to work so that all the girls of today have the right to be free women tomorrow through education. All reports of international institutions show it: investing in the potential of a girl constitutes a lever of emancipation which allows the development of all her community, of her country, and allows her to gain financial independence in order to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

Please visit HERE to find information, and to download content from UNESCO’s social media toolkits, plus videos to share.

To read a report released October 2020 that focuses on how progress made in girls’ education over past 25 years, is now threatened by COVID-19 Click HERE

For further information on the International Day of the Girl, click HERE.

International Day of the Girl Summit HERE.