Obamas push to help educate girls around the world
President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama announced Tuesday that the administration will expand a program to help adolescent girls across the world receive an education.
The Let Girls Learn initiative will build on a U.S. Agency for International Development campaign launched last year to provide an education to the more than 60 million girls not in school. Existing government programs address topics such as education, leadership, nutrition and protection against gender-based violence and forced marriages.
“I want to make sure that no girl out there is denied her chance to be a strong, capable woman with the resources that she needs to succeed – that no girl is prevented from making her unique contributions to the world,” President Obama said. “Every child is precious. Every girl is precious. Every girl deserves an education.”
The president and first lady said this issue is personal to them because they are the parents of two daughters.
“I see myself in these girls. I see our daughters in these girls,” Michelle Obama said. “And like all of you, I just can’t walk away from them. Like you, I can’t just sit back and accept the barriers that keep them from realizing their promise.”
The Peace Corps will look for ways to overcome barriers that prevent girls from completing their educations, including the cost of a uniform, school fees or a lack of textbooks, Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet told reporters Monday night.
The organization’s nearly 7,000 volunteers in more than 60 developing countries already work with communities through grass-roots training, Hessler-Radelet said.
“Peace Corps volunteers are in a unique position to break down barriers to girls’ education at the community level,” Hessler-Radelet said. “They speak the local language, they understand the local culture.”
The program will start with 11 countries the first year: Albania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Georgia, Ghana, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Togo and Uganda. More countries will be included the following year, according to the White House.
As part of the new initiative, Michelle Obama will travel to Japan and Cambodia later this month. She said she will meet with Akie Abe, the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. In Cambodia, she said she will meet with Peace Corps volunteers and visit a local school.
President Obama’s budget recommends $250 million in new and reallocated money for girls programs worldwide, including education, said Tina Tchen, the first lady’s chief of staff.
USAID already invests $1 billion annually in international education, and the organization has helped train more than 300,000 teachers worldwide and provide more than 35 million textbooks and teaching material in a single year, said Susan Markham, USAID’s senior coordinator for gender equality and women’s empowerment.
This story was originally published March 3, 2015 at 8:31 PM with the headline "Obamas push to help educate girls around the world."