Klara’s Universe

Girls’ education has rightly gained the spotlight in recent years as an important strategy to achieve not just one, but many of the international targets set at the Millennium Summit in 2000. It has been widely documented that getting girls into schools is essential not only to put the goal for universal primary education on track and empower women, but has a central role in the struggle to achieve other MDGs, if not all. South Asia is the region where the boys/girls student ratio in access to primary schooling has seen the most dramatic change and India is outperforming some of its neighbours in South Asia in reducing poverty and improving child and maternal health. Based on the results of many well-documented studies, it has become clear that women’s education has a strong positive impact on several other social development areas in India and this paper aims to set a comprehensive and global perspective on the role of girls’ education and achieving the MDGs.

It is widely recognised that educated women can not only take better care of their own health and that of their offspring, they can also improve their work and income, participate in sustainable development and gain a more prominent role in the partnership for development. These are in fact the major areas the MDGs are mostly concerned with. But while many isolated studies linking girls’ education and reproductive behaviour or mother’s education and children’s health, there are few studies that cast a comprehensive view of the impact of girls’ education on each of the MDGs.

In terms of gender parity in primary schools, South Asia has climbed up two places from holding the lowest position in the regions’ chart in 1991 with a ratio of about 0.75, to reaching a ratio of 0.93 by 2005 and out coming Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States. Home to the world’s largest illiterate population (268.4 million), a 65 percentage of which are women, India still has a long way to catch up with on its way to achieving several MDGs. Although performing much better than some of its neighbours in South Asia in several of the MDGs, and largely due to its large population, India still houses a large number of people living with HIV/AIDS, has increased rates of child and maternal mortality and is among the top countries where deforestation and access to safe drinking water are a major issue. It is therefore especially meaningful to look at India as an example of a country where the recent boom in increased girls’ enrolment and completion rates has the potential of being the key to improving its performance in many other international targets.