8850 Form Empowerment 2016-2025

When we talk about two billion people living in poverty, why should we try to gear resources toward women and girls in those communities? Well, if you're thinking chivalry, you lose. It's all about results. You see, when women and girls are healthy, educated, empowered, and able to work, everyone wins. How? So let's start with a few basics. Since 1990, maternal deaths worldwide have dropped 45 percent. So the health and well-being of women, newborns, and children are closely linked and help build prosperous communities and nations. Women spend 90 percent of their income on things that directly benefit their families. They prioritize things like food, medicine, and education for their children. And mothers who've had an education are more than twice as likely to send their own kids to school as mothers with no education. Now, I could go on, but you get the point. No country can reach its full potential by ignoring half of its population. If we want a healthier, more productive world, then unleashing the power of women and girls is one of the smartest and most obvious ways to realize it. Here are just a few ways we can do that. In Africa, where half of the farmers are women, giving them the same access to resources that men have, like mobile phones, farming tools, and information, could increase their yields by 20 to 30 percent, feeding more people and driving economic growth. In India, if women participated equally in the labor force, the country could see an additional 10% income per capita by 2020. And globally, if women's level of employment matched men's over the next 15 years, the GDP of these countries, which is a way to measure an economy's health, would go up by 12 percent. The evidence is clear....