'Girl Effect' Could Lift the Global Economy

Training and supporting young women can transform countries' economic development

By Alyson Warhurst

There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the "girl effect," which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.

Here's why: When a girl benefits, so does everyone in society, including business. Girls as economic actors can bring about change for themselves, their families, and their countries. Conversely, ignoring the girl effect can cost societies billions in lost potential.

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later, on average, and has 2.2 fewer children.

• An extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls' future wages by 10% to 20%, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15% to 25%. The size of a country's economy is in no small part determined by the educational attainment and skill sets of its girls.

• Young women have a 90% probability of investing their earned income back into their families, while the likelihood of men doing the same is only 30% to 40%.

• A girl's school attainment is linked to her own health and well-being, as well as reduced death rates: For every additional year of schooling, a mother's mortality is significantly reduced, and the infant mortality rate of her children declines by 5% to 10%.

• If educated, girls can get loans, start businesses, employ other women, and reinvest in their families—when they're ready to have them. That means their children can also have an education.

Consider the situation in Kenya. Some 1.6 million girls there drop out of high school every year. If they finished their secondary education, they would make 30% more money and contribute $3.2 billion more to the Kenyan economy every year. Instead, many take their place among Kenya's 204,000 adolescent mothers and cost the economy $500 million a year.

According to Your Move, a toolkit on the Web site www.girleffect.org, girls in Kenya could, over their lifetime, lift the nation's economy by $27.4 billion through additional education, $25 billion if they delay childbirth, and $1.6 billion if they stay free of HIV/AIDS. Yet without policy intervention, staying HIV/AIDS-free is extremely difficult, and as a result, in Nairobi's urban slums a girl is six times as likely to be HIV-positive than a boy.

Running Their Own Businesses

The girl effect is the same the world over. Yet even though this is well known, girls as a group still receive less than 0.5% of official development assistance. To unleash the potential power of girls on economic development, further action is needed, including protecting their security and meeting their basic needs. When we do this, girls could have the opportunity to create a ripple effect of positive social and economic change.

Some groups are beginning to act. In Bangladesh, for instance, where in some regions nearly 90% of girls are married before 18, the Nike (NKE) Foundation is a partner in a program that trains girls to build solar panels for their villages. At the same time, nongovernmental organization BRAC has pioneered a microfinance program that by 2007 had provided 40,000 adolescent girls with the capital (as well as the confidence and skills) to run their own farming businesses. That, in turn, allows many to pay their own and their siblings' school fees.