Invest in women and girls

According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the age of 6 and 17 are out of school, and 15 million girls of primary-school age - half of them in sub-Saharan Africa - will never enter a classroom.

The World Bank has been supporting the girls' education agenda, in particular over the last 2 years. It has invested over $3.2 billion over the past two years through education projects that directly benefit adolescent girls. Research has shown that educating girls has a clear 'multiplier effect'. Better-educated women tend to be healthier, participate more in the formal labour market, therefore earn more, give birth to fewer children, marry at a later age, and in turn provide better health care and education to their children.

In the 1920s the Ghanaian scholar James Emman Aggrey said 'if you educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation.' Nearly 100 years later these words still ring true.

As AACT develops further, one of the initiatives we will seek to support in partnership will be the education of girls and women.