Investing in Girls' Education Is The Key To Building A More Equitable Future
Carbon capture, solar panels, and electric cars are well-known technological solutions to the climate crisis. But research proves that investing in girls’ education is one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, strategies in creating a more sustainable future.
When girls receive secondary education, they are more resilient to climate disasters and more empowered economically and within their communities. Education fosters powerful, inspiring women leaders, such as Vanessa Nakate, who founded Rise Up Movement to amplify activists throughout Africa, and Christiana Figueres, the UN diplomat who led negotiations for the Paris Climate Agreement.
Perpetuating neo-colonialism through population control
Project Drawdown, which explores 100 essential climate solutions, estimates that securing every girl’s right to an education could reduce carbon emissions by over 85 gigatons. However, in establishing a direct link between education and fertility, such research enables an environment of coercive neocolonial population control, with current investments in girls’ education typically flowing from countries in the global north to the global south where the population is projected to experience the fastest growth this century.
What’s more, focusing exclusively on population size distracts us from attending to how each individual contributes to overall emissions. For example, research suggests that a smaller but more educated and urban population could actually emit higher emissions per capita, compared with a larger but less educated rural population. Analysis has also demonstrated how countries can decrease their direct emissions while increasing their consumption of high-carbon goods, by offshoring carbon emissions to other countries during production cycles.
Rather than the current population policies and strategies of fertility linked to western education systems, achieving gender parity in education must be reframed towards the critical role education plays in fostering girls’ leadership and empowering women to make their voices heard and influence public policy. As Malala Yousafzai said, “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.”
Fostering gender-transformative education
The current moment requires a renewed commitment to gender-transformative education, ensuring that systems of learning, economies, and societies work for girls and not against them. Beyond the health and economic effects of Covid-19, our world now faces a growing education emergency, with women and girls most at risk.
Organisations such as the Malala Fund and World Woman Foundation envisage forms of education that transform gender norms and relations between men and women. World Woman Foundation’s Global Mentorship Program has reached 40,000 girls and women in India, Bangladesh, the US, Indonesia, Nigeria and Afghanistan, empowering and energising mentees to reach their goals in education, business, family, and life.
Fostering girls’ leadership
Gender equality in education is at the heart of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals agenda. The framework encourages us to look beyond gender parity in education to promote equal participation and progression. Indeed, simply counting girls in classrooms obscures the multi-dimensional barriers to girls’ empowerment in and through education. A whole-system, transformative approach to education is needed to dismantle the structures that justify and perpetuate gender inequality.
An equal world is an enabled world, and only when all girls achieve their right to education will we have a chance at tackling the major challenges of our time. Countries where women have greater social and political status produce fewer carbon emissions and have smaller climate footprints while nations with higher proportions of women in parliament are more likely to ratify international environmental treaties, create protected land areas, and have stricter climate change policies.
Written by Caitlin - Conscience Collective
