Rahim Kanani: As president and CEO of CARE USA, how would you characterize the global trend in aware

Rahim Kanani: As president and CEO of CARE USA, how would you characterize the global trend in awareness, advocacy and action towards the social, political and economic empowerment of women and girls around the world?Helene Gayle: I guess you could say the stars have aligned. It’s as if many of the world’s biggest and smartest thinkers have come to the same conclusion almost at once: you can’t marginalize more than half of the globe’s population and expect to see any meaningful solutions to the problems that ail the world. Perhaps it’s because we’re all faced with the same facts: 60 percent of the world’s one billion poorest people are female; women work two-thirds of working hours but earn only 10 percent of the income; nearly two thirds of children out of school in the world are girls.No matter how you measure it, women and girls bear the brunt of poverty. But it’s also clear that women are also our greatest hope for ending it. We at CARE have long believed that if you change the life of a girl or woman, you don’t just change that individual, you change her family and then her community. By doing so, you begin to turn those grim statistics around. Consider that for every year of education you give a girl or woman, she’s more likely to have good health, to give birth to a child who survives and to send that child to school. Investing early, when that woman-to-be is a girl, only amplifies the impact, unlocking potential earlier in life and yielding greater returns for her and everyone around her.The stars really shouldn’t have to align for girls and women to realize their full potential. They deserve solutions that endure, something much closer to a constellation.“Read the interview here: Helene Gayle, President and CEO of CARE USA, on Empowering Women and Girls Worldwide -- source link

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