Prakarti Walia

Despite the progress made over the past years, why is a child without an education still much more likely to be a girl than a boy?

The COVID-19 crisis has posed a threat to decades of progress made towards girls education and gender equality, putting over 11 million girls at risk of not returning to school! The pandemic has pushed inequalities to extremity, affecting girls disproportionately. Lack of education is associated with a lower interest in career development, it curtails women’s voice in the household, at work and can adversely affect their self confidence.

There is no difference in the efforts put in by girls, in fact as documented by the World Development Report 2018, when it comes to actual learning, girls tend to outperform boys in reading, they score higher in exams. We must not deprive girls of education. We must make sure to ‘keep girls in the picture’.