Adolescent Girls in Focus at the World Economic Forum
By Alexandra Brunais
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics. If you invest in girls, if you educate girls, if you get girls into jobs, you solve so many problems.
—Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, World Bank Managing Director
[Girls] are the part of the world's population that could make the biggest impact if supported with economic opportunities.
—Mike Parker, Nike, Inc.
- The Girl Effect on Development
Watch the webcast from the World Economic Forum. - How Girls Can Break the Cycle of Poverty
Get the background on the Adolescent Girls Initiative—an alliance for girls' economic empowerment.
Slideshow: 
How Girls Can Break the Cycle of Poverty
March 2, 2009—This year, for the first time in 39 years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) included a session on adolescent girls. In the midst of the worst global financial crisis in decades, are world leaders in their right mind to focus on girls? Yes, absolutely.
Research has shown that investing in adolescent girls helps tremendously toward reducing poverty. The fact that over 500 million adolescent girls and young women in the developing world do not get the same opportunities as young men is not only a loss for them, but also to their countries and future generations.
Where resources are scarce, young girls are often last in line for schooling and first in line for household work. Even when they do attend school, all too often, they are forced to leave early to marry and have children. This eliminates any chance they might have to earn an income and contribute to the economy. The NGO BRAC estimates that in some regions of Bangladesh almost 90% of girls marry before age 18 and every year more than 1 million girls between 10 and 18 give birth. BRAC estimates that this results in a loss of income of $1,233 per girl per year—almost three times the gross national income per capita in Bangladesh.
Professor Muhammad Yunus, whose organization, the Grameen Bank, gives microloans to women, gave a striking example of how girls will excel if given the opportunity. One of his Bank's initiatives is Grameen Shakti, a company that sells solar energy in villages. Grameen Shakti exclusively recruited girls and trained them to build and maintain the solar energy systems in their villages. Not only have the girls gained the respect of their communities as "Grameen Engineers," but Grameen Shakti is one of the largest growing renewable energy companies in the developing world. Thanks to this success, Grameen Bank is planning a similar initiative in healthcare, where young women will be trained as nurses and paramedics to run community-based health management centers focused on both treatment and prevention.
On the other hand, when a girl is given the opportunity to study, she has a good chance of finding employment, earning an income and becoming financially independent, all of which improves her life. But the benefits do not end there: studies show that she is likely to reinvest about 90% of her earnings into her family's wellbeing, improving the lives of those around her. She will also marry and have children later in life, and be able to learn how to keep her children healthy and educated. This contributes to slowing population growth, which in turn impacts everything from health to climate change to the economy. So, investing in girls can be crucial for breaking the cycle of poverty from generation to generation.
This is why world leaders put adolescent girls on their agenda, and why the plenary session "The Girl Effect on Development" was the fourth most attended event of the WEF's 2009 Annual Meetings. As the session came to an end, World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala took the microphone. "Raise your hand," she said, "if you now understand and believe in why we must invest in girls." Everyone in the audience raised their hand—a hopeful sign for girls and for a crisis-stricken world.
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