Girls

• Maybe it’s because I’m a dad of a 12 year old girl?
• Maybe it’s because I was raised by a hard-working single mom?
• Maybe it’s because I’m married to an amazing woman?
• Or maybe it’s a secret agenda I have to meddle with the way things have always worked for the stupid, psychotic sake of dreaming about what might be possible in the future?

But I invest in girls. Whether it’s by investing in small businesses started by women and funded through Kiva or through child sponsorship at World Vision or even more locally in the daily decisions we make as a family. We invest in women.

Why?

• When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 percent-40 percent for men.
• An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10-20 percent. An extra year of secondary school ups those wages by 15-25 percent.
• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries 4 years later and has 2.2 fewer children.

Source

That’s why.

It’s not that women are more important than men. It’s that investing in the education or enterprise of women changes the world more effectively and efficiently than general investment in community development.