“With the Sustainable Development Goals now in place, it is imperative that none of our girls are left behind”, said Reni Jacob from World Vision India. From then on, they are part of the husband’s family, usually at their beck and call, in a life of complete submission with no rights.
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Imagine a girl standing at the fork of a road.
According to statistics from the Syariah Judiciary Department in 2012, there were 1,165 applications for marriage where one partner was below the legal age of marriage.
These girls have been talking about how the lack of access to knowledge usually leads to early pregnancy, feeding the vicious cycle of being powerless in the fight against early marriage.
Each day about 39,000 girls worldwide are forced to marry, said CARE, citing United Nations figures. And if we continue to do so, everyone in our region and in our world – communities, businesses, families, children – will suffer.
62 million girls are not in school.
At present far too many across Asia and the Pacific are constrained by social norms, deeply-rooted gender roles and outright discrimination – including a widespread preference for boys over girls.
Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage is a global partnership of over 500 civil society organisations from more than 70 countries, committed to ending child marriage and enabling girls to fulfil their potential. World Vision India, a child-focussed NGO has brought out a compilation of letters written by young girls, highlighting their needs and aspirations.
For their sakes – and for ours as a whole – we need to ensure that adolescent girls are not invisible. HRCM urged that the adolescent girls of today should be at the same level as boys in the nation’s social, economic, technical and political fields of tomorrow.
Services and programmes must also be underpinned with the realisation that adolescent girls are not just recipients of interventions and support, but are recognised as agents of development and change.
On this occasion, the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) affirms the importance of investing in adolescent girls’ empowerment and rights.
The evidence is clear.
This year, as the global community assesses progress under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) since their implementation in 2000 and sets goals to be achieved by 2030, girls born at the turn of the millennium have reached adolescence, and the generation of girls born this year will be adolescents in 2030.
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Dr Ibrahim said despite the impressive gains in the Zambia primary education sector, the rate of transition to secondary education is low at 59.4 per cent with an overall completion rate at grade 12 at 28.56 percent for girls.
