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Educating Girls and Climate Change?

It’s official: because of Climate Change, 2023 will be the hottest year on record. We, as inhabitants of the earth, have managed to change this place from a hospitable, livable environment to one that is quickly changing into something vastly different than what we’re used to; the way our food is produced is changing, animals are going extinct at a record pace, and weather, well, it’s just getting weird as oceans warm and the waters continue to rise. 

There’s so much doom and gloom that’s being thrown around. Much of it justified but, at some point, we need to take a good, hard look into the mirror and ask ourselves what, if anything, can be done to fix this. 

The good news is that there’s a lot that we can do. One of those things, arguably one of the most powerful, comes in the form educating girls in the world’s poorest nations. 

At first glance, it’s easy to look at these two issues–girls’ education and climate change–and see them as separate entities. When talking about solutions, however, there’s an incredibly strong link between the two. 

Before we get too far in, I’m choosing to break this down into two separate blogs, simply because it’s such there’s so contextual and evidential information to cover. 

Setting the Stage 

There’s an international research organization called Project Drawdown, that released a book which details a comprehensive plan to combat climate change. In the book, they list the 80 most impactful things that we could be doing right now to combat the climate crisis; on that list, educating girls came in at number six. In other words, educating girls is the sixth most effective thing that we could and should be doing to turn the tide on climate change. 

By the way, for those of you looking at a Tesla or Rivian now, electric vehicles came in at number 29.

Project Drawdown estimates that, by educating girls, we could see a reduction of 51.48 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the same mass as 515,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers. For further comparison, the Empire State Building weighs .00003 Gigatons, and all of the people currently on earth come in at a mass of .06. So 51.48? That’s a fairly significant number. 

To further strengthen the point, Project Drawdown claims that educating girls in developing nations can have a greater impact than solar farms, wind turbines and mass adoption of plant-rich diets combined.

So how does this all work? I break it down into three basic ways. I’ll call them: Family Planning, Food production, and giving women a Voice. And in this post, we’ll be discussing Family Planning.

Before we dive into how things can be, let’s spend a few minutes talking about how things are right now.  

The Current Situaton

In many areas of the world, girls don’t have much of a choice about how they’re going to spend their future, or how they’re going to live their lives; they largely do what they’re told, they do their “duty”, and they typically get married at a very young age. Once married, they wind up having a bunch of kids, because that’s what they’re supposed to do. Keep in mind that having a bunch of kids is advantageous for a few reasons. 

Firstly, kids are needed to help with work that needs to be done, to simply survive as a community. More bodies means that more work can be accomplished whether it’s farming, housework, fetching water or selling things. Put briefly, more kids means that more work can be done. With more kids, day to day existence just gets that much easier. Things like high infant mortality rates, illnesses and unhealthy diets also affect the amount of labor a person can do. In other words, you really can’t have, say, 4 kids, and expect to have 4 productive bodies in the house. So, you’ll need to have more.

Secondly, odds are, the more kids you have, the better you’ll be taken care of as age starts to impact your ability to be productive and earn a living; a lot of kids can be a good thing if you haven’t made enough money to survive by the time you hit retirement age. Keep in mind that retirement accounts aren’t an option for people in underdeveloped nations. Instead, they rely on family to survive. More kids increases your odds of keeping a roof over your head, receiving medical care and consistently having food on the table. 

Again, this is what happens when people – and we’re talking about girls here – don’t have a lot of opportunities in life. Keep in mind also that most of these societies are strongly patriarchal, to a degree to which we really can’t relate in the developed world. In poorer countries, women obey what their husbands tell them to do, simply because it’s what they’re programmed to do. It’s deeply engrained in the culture and whatever the guy wants, he’s likely to get. If the husband wants more kids, more kids will be had, no discussion.

There’s also issues such as spousal rape, which, though technically illegal in many countries, is rarely reported. Because of wives’ obligation to submit to their husbands, husbands experience the freedom to conduct themselves in whatever manner they wish within their marriage situations. In fact, in Southeast Asia, roughly a third of women will experience physical or sexual violence from a current or former spouse ***, and that’s just a number that’s been reported. Likely, the actual number is much higher. 

So, when talking about the subject of girls’ education in poorer countries, as much as it’s the environmentally responsible thing to do, it’s also the morally responsible thing to do.

Another interesting thing to note is that, in some of these countries, marriage proposals can come rather quickly after two people meet, sometimes in as little as a week or two. There exists the idea that the couple will date and get to know each other after they get married, so neither party really knows what they’re signing up for. But in the end, we’re left with a continuous cycle. This continues generation after generation because, it’s just how things work.

Educating girls changes all of this.

Before I jump into how this happens, let me first say that educating boys in these countries is a good thing, but if you educate boys only, it seems that, for whatever reason, not a lot of large-scale change happens. It’s been my experience that, even when these boys are given the tools to succeed, they tend not to take advantage of the knowledge that they’ve gained. As they enter adulthood, they tend to farm the same lands using the same methods, fish the same waters in the same boats, and communities remain stagnant. 

Educating boys also risks a reinforcement and strengthening of a male dominated status quo. Perhaps it can give them even more of a leg-up over women than they already have, and an even stronger platform to say, “Look, I’m a guy, you’re a girl, and I’m smarter than you, so you need to listen, not argue, play your role and do what I say.” That’s not to say that educating boys is a bad thing, but again, they tend not to create the same ripple effect with the knowledge that they gain in school. So when we educate them only, not a lot changes, economically or culturally. 

Girls Education: The Game Changer

There’s an old African proverb that goes like this: If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a nation. Experience seems to tell us that this is accurate.

To begin with, study after study confirms that girls who have had at least a secondary level of education have more options in life, and they actively take advantage of those. They’re empowered to so something in life other than “their duty”, and what they do with their knowledge impacts the community as a whole. 

Educated girls have more of a choice in who and when they marry, and they tend to marry when they’re older. They also wind up having fewer children. Furthermore, children of educated women are far more likely to go to school themselves, which perpetuations a really, really good cycle. Educated women also eat healthier diets, as do their families, are able to make more money in their careers, see lower risk for things like AIDS, are less likely to fall victim to human trafficking, and so much more. Again, this is as much an issue of human rights as it is one that benefits our planet.

Look at a few of these facts when it comes to educated women: (and there are a lot more; far more than I can count)

• A study in Zambia finds that HIV spreads twice as fast among uneducated girls.

• A study in Uganda demonstrated that each additional year of education for girls reduces their chances of contracting HIV by 6.7 percent.

• In Indonesia, child vaccination rates are 19 percent when mothers who have no education. This figure increases to 68 percent when mothers have at least secondary school education.6

• A 35-year study in Guatemala found a link between the years girls spent in school and the timing of childbearing. For each additional year a young woman spent in school, the age at which she had her first child was delayed approximately six to 10 months.1

• A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past the age of 5 than a child born to an illiterate woman.

• In Bangladesh and Indonesia, the odds of having a child who is shorter than average for its age decreases by around 5 percent for every additional year of formal education a mother has.

• A study in Mali observed that educated women had an average of 3 children, and women with no education went on to have 7 children. 

Population: The Key

And that last point is the main link between the family planning aspect of educating girls and its impact on climate change: fewer bodies on the planet. It’s true that I did say that having a lot of kids for some of these families can be a good thing. The reality is though, when girls are educated, everything changes.

For a little more perspective on the impact that this has on population, it’s been estimated in many studies that, if we focus on educating girls today, there will be at least 150 million fewer people on the planet by 2050. For comparison, that’s more than the total population of Russia today, and more than three times the population of the entire state of California. How many fewer people does that represent by 2070, or 2090 when the children of the children born today have even more children? The answer? A lot.

There are quite a few professionals who spend their careers trying to estimate exactly how many people this planet can support. And there are a lot of different numbers that get thrown around. Some say that we’ve already eclipsed the number, while others say that the earth can effectively double our population, provided we’re ok with the idea of drastically changing our global lifestyles, (and yes, that means even us here in the developed world). When I talk about lifestyle alterations, I’m referring to things such as including cockroaches into our daily diets.

Arriving at a precise number is difficult because it relies on far more than just a mathematical calculation of available farmland and drinkable water, it also depends on things like our ability to work cohesively to ensure that all peoples have what they need to survive, which is unknowable at best.

And, while we’re unable to generate a specific number, there is unified agreement that the course that we’re on is not a good one. 

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The earth currently has over 8 billion people living on it, which is up from 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and 6.9 billion in the year 2010. That’s a trajectory that desperately needs to be altered. And again, ensuring that all girls, regardless of geographical location, have access to education is something that’s more of an imperative as opposed to something that would be nice to do one day.

That’s not to say that it’s easy, there are actually quite a few challenges associated with it, cultural and otherwise. There are however, a lot of organizations out there who are active and who are able to effectively navigate these challenges.

I’ve seen this work first hand and the difference that education makes in the life of a woman living in a less-developed nation can be astounding. Of course, nothing can guarantee positive results, there are far too many factors involved, but education is a vital course of action that must be pursued. 

It’s easy to live here in the US or some other developed nation and ignore the impacts of climate change. In the less developed world however, it’s in escapable. And girls and women in these areas are the most vulnerable. 

I was listening to a roundtable about the women and the impacts of climate change. One of the speakers, who was from Africa, talked about how it is forbidden for girls to learn how to climb trees as they’re growing up, there’s the idea that it makes them “less valuable”. While boys are climbing and playing, girls aren’t allowed to participate. So, when the rains come and flood waters come, boys can climb trees to escape the flood waters. Girls, on the other hand, can’t, they don’t know how. So as boys stay relatively safe, girls are swept away with all of the debris. 

If we were talking only about the issue of climate change, the family planning aspect alone dictates that educating girls is something that is well worth our attention. The benefits for the climate don’t stop there though, and I’ll examine more in my next blog. Climate change aside, education is also an issue of basic human rights. Sitting on our hands and allowing these girls to remain as they are condemns them to a life of status quo, where their futures are dictated for them. 

I’ve long been a believer that, if we want to change what tomorrow looks like, educate children today, I can think of no better representation of this than the opportunity that we’ve been given to educate girls in developing nations. 

Below, find some links of organizations who do this. Donating to one of them would pay dividends that go far beyond helping the planet. 

CAMFED

CARD (Community Action for Rural Development):

GiveIndia

Educate Girls

EduGirls

MalalaFund

Schoolgirls Unite

More….

The Podcast

One of the many things that I’m Running My Mouth Off about is Climate Change. The Climate Crisis has been all over the news for the past few years and yes, it’s a thing, but it’s not a sitiation that we can’t take some very productive steps to improve. In Running My Mouth off About Climate Change, we’ll explore some of less covered aspects of Climate Change, and discover some very common sense ways that we can improve our outlook. And the best part is, most of these things pay much higher dividends than helping the planet, they’re good from a human rights and abilities perspective. Listen in and let”s get to work!

Click for the latest episode: Why Educating Girls is important, and it is!