World Population Day - LatAm Development Depends on Investing in Teenage Girls Estrella Gutierrez - Inter Press Service | |
go to original July 11, 2016 |
World Population Day: Investing in Teenage Girls (University Rochester)
Latin America’s teenage girls are a crucial force for change and for promoting sustainable development, if the region invests in their rights and the correction of unequal opportunities, according to Luiza Carvalho, the regional head of UN Women.
“An empowered adolescent will know her rights and will stand up for them; she has tools for success and is a driving froce for positive change in her community,” Carvalho told IPS in an interview from the regional headquarters of UN Women in Panama City.
Adolescent girls and boys will have a leading role in their societies when the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has been completed, she said. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is gender equality. Investing in today’s girls will have “a great transformative impact in future,” she said.
The world today has a higher proportion of its population aged between 10 and 24 years old than ever before, with 1.8 billion young people out of a total population of 7.3 billion. Roughly 20 percent of this age group live in Latin America and the Caribbean, Carvalho said.
According to data given to IPS by the regional office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 57 million of the region’s 634 million people are girls aged between 10 and 19, living mainly in cities.
The theme for this year’s World Population Day, celebrated July 11, is “Investing in Teenage Girls”, on the premise that transforming their present situation to guarantee their right to equality will not only eliminate barriers to their individual potential but will also be decisive for the sustainable development of their countries.
Women Deliver, an international organisation, has calculated the benefits of this investment in financial terms. For every additional 10 percent of girls in school, national GDP rises by an average of three percent; for every extra year of primary schooling a girl has completed, her expected salary as an adult grows by between 10 and 20 percent.
This is fundamental because, as Carvalho pointed out, “lack of economic empowerment, together with generalised gender discrimination and the reinforcemet of traditional stereotypes, negatively affects the capability of women in Latin America and the Caribbean to participate on an equal footing in all aspects of public and private life.”
Read the rest at Inter Press Service | En español
Related: Talking Openly – The Way to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy (Inter Press Service)
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