Development Channel

“When girls get educated—when they learn to read and write and think—that gives them the tools to speak up and to talk about injustice, and to demand equal treatment. It helps them participate in the political life of their country and hold their leaders accountable, call for change when their needs and aspirations aren’t being met.” These were the words of First Lady Michelle Obama as she addressed Peace Corps volunteers in Cambodia last weekend, part of her trip to promote the administration’s Let Girls Learn program. In fact, the Let Girls Learn initiative is a consolidation of many programs that already existed to support girls’ education—including those under the U.S. Agency for International Development and Peace Corps—now with the presidential stamp. Beyond repackaging and rebranding, the White House also added 650 new Peace Corps volunteer positions specifically tasked to work on girls’ education. At nearly 10 percent of the Peace Corps’ current size, these new volunteers are not insignificant. This expansion remains in line with the original mission of the Peace Corps founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961; the first-ever Peace Corps mission to Ghana comprised fifty-one teachers, and nearly two-fifths of the current Corps focuses on education. Founded during the Cold War as a means of winning hearts and minds among nonaligned developing nations, the Peace Corps’ mission is to provide trained manpower and to promote understanding between Americans and people in the countries served. Because Peace Corps is a small, cost-effective operation with a superb reputation across party lines, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama separately pledged to double the size of the Peace Corps. President and Mrs. Obama’s personal announcement of Let Girls Learn—including the expansion of Peace Corps’ capacity to support it—demonstrates a strong commitment to girls’ education as part of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. With the help of celebrities and social media, the White House has marked girls’ education abroad as a priority for the administration and a piece of the Obamas’ presidential legacy. As the first lady’s comments to Cambodia Peace Corps volunteers indicate, the White House’s support of girls’ education is not only an important end in and of itself. Investment in girls’ education pays dividends for women’s rights, economic growth, and stability abroad.

In the lead up to the announcement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in September, I had the opportunity to host a conversation with Julia Gillard, chair of the Global Partnership for Education and former prime minister of Australia, at the Council on Foreign Relations. Education was the focus of our discussion: education as a security issue, a foreign policy priority, and a development imperative when it comes to the fight against global poverty. The conversation spanned topics including the relationship among education, national security, and radicalization—and the urgency of creating hope among a young generation of children displaced by conflict and upheaval—to the role of the private sector in funding education initiatives and the battle to end child marriage. These topics are inextricably linked, and the role of education is central to any development, security, or economic growth discussion. Yet often these conversations remain in silos. Part of the roundtable’s discussion was aimed at the question of how to break down those barriers among policymakers. How is education tied to terrorism and national security? In the words of Prime Minister Gillard, “anger is disappointed hope,” and when children in refugee camps see themselves with no future, no possibility to improve their lives peacefully, extremist narratives catch hold, and the process of radicalization begins. The White House recently focused on girls’ education in a high profile event where President and Mrs. Obama unveiled the new Let Girls Learn initiative. As the president said in his weekly address, “I’m convinced that a world in which girls are educated is a safer, more stable, more prosperous place. When girls are educated, their future children are healthier and better nourished. Their future wages increase, which in turn strengthens their families’ security. National growth gets a boost, too. And places where women and girls are treated as full and equal citizens tend to be more stable and more democratic.” Education is also linked to child marriage. For adolescent girls in some parts of the world, their parents may choose marriage over education. For them, the discussions of child marriage and education are not separate—they are one and the same. As President Obama noted in a White House event to launch the Let Girls Learn initiative, “Maybe girls aren’t in school because they’re expected to get married and become mothers while they’re still teens—or even earlier. Even today, in too many parts of the world, girls are valued more for their bodies than for their minds. That’s not just antiquated. It’s not just a bad strategy for any country that’s serious about growing their economy.” Continued the president, “We know that when girls are educated, they’re more likely to delay marriage. Their future children, as a consequence, are more likely to be healthy and better nourished. Their future wages increase, which, in turn, strengthens the security of their family. And national growth gets a boost, as well.” And in order to make a real impact in the lives of girls and women—and boys and men—on the ground, barriers preventing girls from staying in school must be tackled. The fight to keep girl children from becoming child wives and child mothers must be won. And to win these battles, policymakers must address the challenges of national security, child marriage, and education as one.

On International Women’s Day this past Monday, I attended the release of the Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings: The Full Participation Report, which Hillary Clinton launched alongside Melinda Gates and Chelsea Clinton. Building off the momentum generated at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the No Ceilings report uses data collected over the last twenty years to note both the gains and gaps in women and girls’ participation globally. This September marks the twentieth anniversary of the Beijing Conference, a landmark moment where world leaders, in effect, embraced then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s statement at the Conference that “women’s rights are human rights.” Clinton and her family’s foundation have continued to push for women’s rights and empowerment. Full disclosure: having attended the Beijing Conference and been moved by Clinton’s speech there, I later had an opportunity to work on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff under her leadership and Policy Planning’s first woman director, Anne-Marie Slaughter. The No Ceilings report highlights the progress women and girls have made, for example, in increased access to primary education, an overall drop in maternal mortality, and the growing recognition of the importance of women to peace and security. At the same time, it underscores the gaps that persist for women and girls, including the life expectancy of women in poor and marginalized areas, low rate of attainment in secondary education, the continuing epidemic of violence against women, overall stagnation in women’s workforce participation, and women’s exclusion from peace and security processes. The report’s emphasis on data—and, indeed, Secretary Clinton’s focus on gender data as a way to address these issues—measures the progress of women and girls internationally and invites policymakers, academics, and activists to take stock of the women’s rights movement. Where is the movement now, and where should it head next? Since the Beijing Conference, there has been a major push for the inclusion of women in international matters, including peace and security discussions, and this drive has elicited a promising response. Though there is still work to be done—as Ambassador Melanne Verveer noted at Monday’s event, only 4 percent of peacekeeping forces are female—policy developments such as UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (and various countries’ national action plans implementing Resolution 1325) show the broad acceptance of the idea that women and women’s rights are critical to the peace and security dialogue. Yet the question remains: has the security paradigm actually changed, or are women simply inserting themselves in a male-dominated regime and culture? To what extent are women transforming the paradigm to pave the way for stemming conflicts, countering violent extremism, and establishing more sustainable peace? And if a major goal of the women’s rights movement, at least since the Beijing Conference, has been to open up opportunities for women’s leadership—not only in peace and security matters, but in other sectors as well—what is the movement’s main objective now? Much has been said about breaking a final glass ceiling: electing a woman president. As Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said at the No Ceilings event, “That glass ceiling is broken—by me.” However, what about the sticky floors and broken ladders to opportunity that women and girls around the globe still face? Will placing more women into positions of power help them?