Female students standing outside of classroom in rural India
Adobe Photos
Empowering women and girls is one of the most effective sustainable development levers, yet initiatives to expand women’s rights and inclusion remain woefully underfunded.
No country has achieved full gender equality, and women’s rights, freedoms, and opportunities vary widely across the world. Nordic countries generally have the highest gender parity scores, while the lowest scores are mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle-Eastern countries. Different organizations use different indexes to determine the extent of gender inequality. One prominent one is the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, or GII, which uses three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment and labor market participation.
According to the UN, almost half of partnered women in low- and middle-income countries still have no decision-making power over their own bodies, meaning they do not get to make their own choices about who they marry or when, whether they use contraceptives, or whether to have sex in the first place. Globally, 257 million women (218 million of whom are in developing countries) who wish to avoid pregnancy are not using modern contraception—they have what is called an unmet need for family planning. As a result, half of all pregnancies worldwide—or 121 million per year—are unintended. Additionally, gender-based violence still affects one-in-three women globally.
The areas with the fastest population growth also have some of the worst gender equality scores. On the other hand, when women are free to choose what happens to their bodies and lives, and when they have opportunities to receive an education and participate in the formal economy, average family size plummets, as evidenced by the many countries—two-thirds of all countries in the world—with below-replacement fertility rates (an average of 2.1 or fewer lifetime births per woman).
Girls in low-income countries who grow up in poor households, alongside large numbers of siblings, often face barriers to enrolling in school or completing their educations—they are frequently needed at home to help care for younger siblings, and their parents often can’t afford school fees and supplies for all of their children. When parents can only manage to send some of their children to school, they typically send the boys.
Additionally, when couples have many children, they often submit their daughters to early marriage in order to reduce their burden of support, and in some cultures, to receive a desperately-needed dowry payment.
Every single year, 12 million girls are married before they reach 18. According to UNICEF, regional levels of child marriage are as follows:
Child marriage typically leads to early and frequent childbearing and a life of unpaid subsistence work and child rearing. And that’s only if girls survive young motherhood. Sadly, the leading cause of death in developing regions for girls 15-19 is complications from pregnancy and childbirth. Adolescent girls are also disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS.
By contrast, when girls receive an education, they tend to marry later, have more opportunities for paid employment, have better health outcomes, and have fewer children over the course of their lives. This virtuous circle continues when their own children are able to stay in school, get married as adults (if at all, and to partners of their choosing), participate in the formal employment sector, and plan the number and timing of their pregnancies and births.
Empowering women and girls is morally imperative for the sake of the individuals who benefit. It also makes entire communities and countries more prosperous, sustainable, and resilient. When women have bodily autonomy, they are better able to care for their own health, raise healthy children with good prospects, and make key contributions to society. Removing barriers to women entering the workforce boosts economic growth, and research shows that more women in decision-making positions leads to more policies aimed at protecting the environment and improving health and education.
Unfortunately, there is still a big mismatch between the funding that is needed to end the worst gender inequalities—including child marriage, gender-based violence, unmet need for family planning, and preventable maternal mortality—and what has been made available. In light of the lack of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and in several cases, major setbacks, there is an urgent need to close the gender equality funding gap.
Empowering girls and women, in addition to all the obvious benefits for individuals, families, communities, and entire countries, is key to making progress toward stabilizing the population. This is especially important in places that are struggling to keep up with the resource and infrastructure needs of the current population.
