Providing education for girls is the key for gender equality. Girls and women who are educated are more likely to earn more money and work outside of the home, reinvest in their families, raise healthier children and continue to impact society for generations to come.

1. Former Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers estimated that investing $40,000 a year to educate 1,000 Pakistani girls has the highest social rate of return in the world.
2. A mother with a primary education is 5 times (500%) more likely to send her children to school than a mother with no education.
3. The number of children born to a woman decreases by 40% if the woman has had a primary education.
4. Educated mothers are more likely to send their children to school, a key to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. In Pakistan, mothers’ education is the single strongest determinant of schooling for their children, especially for girls.
5. Out of the world’s 130 million out-of-school youth, 70 percent are girls.
6. When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.
7. Educated mothers have healthier families. Educated mothers access and use beneficial information about health care for themselves and their families and use health services more often. Educated mothers have better nourished children, who are less likely to die in infancy. On average one additional year of schooling for a mother results in a reduction in child or infant mortality of 9 per 1,000.
8. An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent.
9. When women and girls earn income; they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man.

More information can be found by going to The Girl Effect website.