Helping girls learn to read is a matter of life and death.  Literally.

In Bangladesh, maternal mortality rates dropped from 724 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 338 per 100,000 in 2008.  Researchers attributed almost all of this improvement to free primary and secondary education for girls.  Just teaching a girl to read can cut under-5 death rates in half.  Chad has an under-5 death rate of over 200 per 1000 children.  On average, one child per family dies before the age of 5.  A school can cut the rate to 100 per 1000, saving one child for every two families.  If the girls get in school and learn to read.

This means that when you look at a primary school in rural Africa or Asia, you are looking at a hospital with chalkboards.  When you see 20 girls in a classroom, that’s 10 little lives saved in the future.  If the teacher shows up.  If the girls learn to read.  If there are clinics and health services to make sure that education translates into better health opportunities.

Anyone who is serious about health has to be serious about education (and vice versa).  But the educators have missed something important.  I was in Montreal last week for the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society and this is what I talked most about. Yes, schooling matters, but reading matters more.  And if you take the reading results for boys and girls in 80 countries (65 tested through the Programme for International Student Assessment–PISA and 15 tested in a comparable way through the Southern Africa Consortium for Measuring Education Quality–SACMEQ), a remarkable phenomenon appears.  9 of those countries are low-income countries; the rest are middle- or high-income.  And those 9 take the bottom 9 slots for how girls compare to boys in reading.  The absolute levels of achievement are already low.  And on top of that, girls’ chances to achieve even that low standard, compared to boys, are the lowest in the world.  They need it the most; they get it the least.

If teachers don’t know how to teach reading, or the class is taught in a language no one understands, or the books never show up, lives are lost.  It’s as simple as that.  The book is the most powerful vaccine ever invented, for the child who can read it.  That’s why the Education for All – Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) is going to focus on reading and it’s going to focus on girls.

PS: I would like to encourage you to study the work of our partners of the Education Department at the World Bank, who just released their new Education Strategy 2020: Learning for All. In her new blog entry “Let’s Make it Learning for All, Not Just Schooling for All”, Elizabeth King emphasizes the World Bank’s new role in providing not just inputs (like classrooms and teachers training) but also mechanisms to make education work and “equip the next generation with the essential cognitive skills and the skills for critical thinking, teamwork, and innovation.” It is very encouraging to see that EFA FTI and its partners are moving in the same direction in making sure children learn the right skills to become fully engaged, healthy, and productive citizens in society.

More about FTI work in girls’ education:

• Fast-tracking Girls’ Education A Progress Report (March 2011)