Why Focus on Girls?

To educate girls is to reduce poverty.

All the evidence shows that taking girls out of the fields and homes and putting them behind desks raises economic productivity, lowers infant and maternal mortality, reduces fertility rates, and brings better environmental management.

Countries that have pursued gender equality over the past three to four decades have grown faster and become more equal societies.

Girls in developing countries are in trouble. They face systematic disadvantages over a wide range of welfare indicators, including:

• Health
• Education
• Nutrition
• Labor force participation
• Burden of household tasks

Because of deprivation and discriminatory cultural norms, many poor girls are forced to marry at very young ages and are extraordinarily vulnerable to HIV, sexual violence, and physical exploitation. Lacking a full range of economic opportunities and devalued because of gender bias, many girls are seen as unworthy of investment or protection by their families.

To be born a girl in Bukoba, Tanzania, often means being doomed to a life with little education or clean water, with marriage and babies coming too early, too many births, babies who die of preventable diseases, backbreaking work in the fields, emotional subordination to a husband and his family, and an early death. Sexual exploitation of girls and women is another route open for male domination of the female deprived of education.

The uneducated woman transmits to her children the same doomed life.

With women and girls being the major farmers in Bukoba, their education offers a chance to develop more efficient farming practices, improve output, and raise awareness of the ecological needs of the land. In Bukoba, the cost to the family of their girls being in school, instead of working in the home with younger siblings or on agricultural tasks, is huge. It is in the family's immediate interest to have their girls working at home, but it is in the national interest, as well as in the interest of both the girls and their future families, to override this short-term perspective.

The crisis is particularly acute in Tanzania, where girls’ achievement and completion of even a basic education lag far behind that of boys’. Most girls in Bukoba are not given the opportunity to learn beyond the equivalent of a middle school education. A majority are married off before high school.

SHARE is aiming to change future generations, one girl at a time.

SHARE seeks to provide African girls with educational opportunities. It can be considered a life or death matter because girls in SHARE will be able to learn about health, nutrition, and other skills that help them raise healthy families, particularly in the context of what’s going on right now with AIDS and malaria.

SHARE is dedicated to eradicating poverty in Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest counties, through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women, by creating after-school reading programs that are culturally sensitive, financially responsible, and result in real measurable improvements in the lives of the girls we reach.