The former first lady everyone adores, Michelle Obama, will be spearheading a new campaign that works to safeguard girl’s educational rights around the globe.
This past Thursday, Michelle was featured on the Today show to discuss the new program, The Global Girls Alliance, from the Obama Foundation.
The announcement was made on International Day of the Girl, a planned coincident. Michelle shared how the program is designed to give support and aid to the 98 million girls who stand between many obstacles to receive an education.
“The stats show when you educate a girl, you educate a family, a community, a country,” Michelle said during the announcement. “It makes no sense that girls and women are not getting educated, that they’re not in school. If we care about climate change, if we care about poverty, if we care about maternal child health, then we have to care about education.”
The Global Girls Alliance held a series of meetings at the beginning of the summer which involved 1,000 grassroots leaders of organizations that supported global education for young girls. As the alliance continues to expand, it will provide access to speakers, webinars, as well as technical resources to the groups who are already involved in the network.
“For the past several months, these leaders have been sharing their work with each other and suggesting resources for each other based on mutual interests,” a spokesperson informed the Chicago Sun-Times. “This network will grow, but we’re already seeing how members interact and collaborate together. Many [girls around the world] don’t have access to a classroom so we want to play a role in building an alliance of young people who are out there doing the work on the ground,” Obama said of the program. “And we want to give them an opportunity to network with one another because working on these issues out in the world can be lonely.”
“The stats show that when you educate a girl, you educate a family, a community, a country.” @MichelleObama talks @girlsalliance #DayOfTheGirlTODAY pic.twitter.com/W9cwMBoFdR
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 11, 2018
This is not the first time the former First Lady has advocated for young girls. Back in 2015, Michelle started the initiative, Let Girls Learn which focused on recruiting government agencies, corporations, as well as nonprofit to invest in the education of girls around the world.
The same program additionally started the #62MillionGirls social media campaign which asked both celebrities and public figures to share their educational backgrounds to help raise awareness of the 62 million girls who were not attending school at that time.
But under the Trump administration, the program has been disbanded.
But thankfully, with Michelle’s new initiative, things can get back on track. The Global Girls Alliance is also a partner with GoFundMe to help specific programs to apply for crowdsourced funding and help enable people to give directly to the project of their choice.
“The world is a sadly dangerous place for women and girls, and we see that again and again,” Obama said on Today. “I think young women are tired of it. They’re tired of being undervalued. They’re tired of being disregarded. They’re tired of their voices not being invested in and heard… And if we’re going to change that, we have to give them the tools and the skills through education to be able to lift those voices up.”
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