We’ve just gone through our annual national panic attack about the perfect gift for Mother’s Day. What do mothers really want, anyway? Flowers and candy and a nice dinner out? Surely we can do better than that.
Education might be the best gift. In America, most mothers already are educated, of course, but around the world, a surprising number of them are not so fortunate. One in every four girls worldwide never finishes fifth grade, and about 58 million girls are not in school at all.
The result is something I saw in Nepal a few years ago – illiterate, desperate mothers trying to learn to read so they could get themselves out of poverty and make a better life for their children.
I was in Nepal with Save the Children to visit a remote mountain clinic where babies were being vaccinated against infectious diseases. Women, including many teenage mothers, were crowded into a literacy class at midnight and told me they had walked an hour after work to get there, bringing their children along. They said they would walk another hour in the dark to get home, and then start work only a few hours later.
I asked them, “Why, why do you do this?” And they said, “I want to be able to read letters from my children if they leave the village.”
“I want to read signs.”
“I want to teach my children.”
“I want to be equal.”
In too much of the world, girls’ futures are limited to early marriage and childbearing, and because so many girls are uneducated, they face higher rates of maternal and child mortality, greater poverty and higher rates of HIV/AIDS infection. The women in Nepal told me they would have five to eight or more children each, even though they could only afford to raise two or three, because they thought some of them would not survive.
They were probably right: One out of every 16 babies in Nepal dies in infancy. And those mothers were right to seek education as a solution. Seventy years of Save the Children research and experience worldwide proves that every year of schooling for women corresponds with better nutrition, sanitation, health care and income for her family. Children born to mothers who complete primary school are half as likely to die before age 5 as those whose mothers are uneducated. They are then more likely to be sent to school themselves, and the happy cycle continues.
Where governments have invested in education for girls and women, economies have been transformed. In the 1950s, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea had education and economic statistics like those of sub-Saharan Africa today. But today, 94 percent of East Asia’s adult population can read and write, including women, and the “Asian tiger” economic miracle is the result.
This year’s Save the Children report on the State of the World’s Mothers, released last week, shows that countries do not have to be rich to educate everyone. In fact, some of the poorest countries are improving education for girls at a faster rate than wealthier ones: Kenya has a gross domestic product per capita of $1,020 but is exceeding expectations, while Saudi Arabia, with a per capita GDP of $12,650, is under-performing. In short, where there’s political will to educate girls and women, there’s a way.
The greatest gift for anyone this Mother’s Day would be to help make that political will to educate girls a reality worldwide. More governments can be prodded to fund programs that give all children, especially girls, the chance to go to school.
Just imagine what those women in Nepal could do, and what their children could become, if they had those children a little later in life, after they had finished school themselves, after they knew how to protect those children from disease and feed and care for them better; and when they had the qualifications and the knowledge to earn a better living. It would almost be Mother’s Day every day of the year.
Actress Sally Field has served as a volunteer spokesperson and advocate for Save the Children since 1995.
