A girl deprived of education is deprived of her basic rights. She is relegated to household chores, exposed to pregnancy and early marriage and to dependency. Ensuring that all girls and women have access to an quality education is essential to respect their rights and to accelerate the building of a just and sustainable world.

Girls and women in emergency situations

Girls and women face multiple discrimination and violence from birth:

• 130 million girls worldwide are not in school (UNESCO, 2018).
• 12 million girls are married early (UNESCO, 2019).
• 18.5 million girls, aged 15-19, give birth (UNESCO, 2019).

COVID 19, like all crises, has further aggravated the situation of girls around the world:

• More than 11 million additional girls are at risk of not returning to school (UNESCO, 2020).
• More than 10 million additional early marriages are expected in the next ten years (UNESCO, 2021)
• The number of female genital mutilations could increase by 2 million over the next decade (UNESCO, 2021).

What is Action Education doing to support girls' and women's education?

Action Education gives priority to the most vulnerable populations, especially girls and women.

Our aim is to ensure that they acquire lifelong learning so that they can be masters of their own development, autonomous and agents of change.

Our projects for girls' education

Our association works, among other things, to deconstruct gender stereotypes.

We raise awareness in communities about the importance of girls' rights, and encourage young girls to assert their rights.

Once educated, they have the opportunity to become agents of change in their communities and to bring about behavioural change.

We are also working on educational content to promote gender equality from an early age.

For example, in Vietnam, our team launched the first bilingual (Vietnamese-Hmong) textbook with gender equality as one of its major topics.

Thus, children aged 5 to 8 are made aware of this issue early on.

Develop standards from the earliest age is the key to success for generations to come.

Our projects for women's education

We offer women who have been deprived of education two types of support: literacy and socio-professional training with support for entrepreneurship.

These trainings enable them to acquire skills, gain confidence and access better economic opportunities. In the long term, it helps to transform cultural gender traditions and to reverse the prevailing distribution of power. It is being implemented in most of our countries of intervention, including India and Laos.

This programme, which is known in Burkina Faso as FORSELF, provides 400 illiterate women in Ouagadougou who are already running low-income activities with training in leadership, entrepreneurship, support for business creation and guidance on accessing financial services.