In the age of the Internet, 130 million children do not even have the opportunity to learn to read and write.
A fifth of all school-age children are unable to go to school because their families are too poor or because the schools are too overcrowded or too far away. Girls still represent the majority of some 75 million of these children. And it is girls who often have to go out to work and to marry early on in their lives, leaving them little time to go to school.
Two thirds of the approximately 875 million people in the world who can neither read nor write are female.
No other form of investment, however, has such a positive and wide-reaching impact on the development of a society than that in the education of girls. Child mortality rates drops proportionally to the amount of time that young mothers are able to continue going to school. Women with a basic school education tend to get married later, have fewer children and are better able to care for them. Education helps girls, not least of all, to get some protection against discrimination, exploitation and dangerous diseases such as AIDS.
To deny people access to education is to deny them a fundamental human right. Human development is impossible without education. Promoting education is therefore one of the ProtectStar Foundation’s most important tasks.
Education is a right. It is the basis for the development of an individual’s cultural identity as well as that of a society. In the short-term, education alone will, of course, not free anybody from hunger or poverty. Education will also not, of itself, immediately bring about social justice and yet it is an essential precondition for sustained human development.
