The Plight of Women and Girls in the Developing World

The latest issue of World Vision magazine focuses on the plight of women and girls in the developing world. Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, has a very powerful editorial, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" the words of which he borrowed from the lyrics of Maurice Chevalier's song.

Unfortunately, those words do not apply for many females in the world. The statistics that he gives are sobering.
compared to her male counterpart, a girl growing up in the developing world is more likely to die before her fifth birthday and less likely to go to school. She is less likely to receive adequate food or health care, less likely to receive economic opportunities, more likely to be forced to marry before the age of 16, and more likely to be the victim of sexual and domestic abuse.

Girls are forced to stay home from school to work. In fact, two-thirds of the nearly 800 million illiterate people in the world are women. Only one in 10 women in Niger can read. Five hundred thousand women die every day from childbirth complications--that's one woman every minute. Girl babies are even killed in countries where males are considered more valuable.

Women are denied property rights and inheritance in many countries. Worldwide, women own only 1 percent of the world's property. They work two-thirds of all the world's labor hours but earn just 10 percent of the world's wages.

Being female, in much of our world, is not "heavenly."

On my trip to South India nine years ago I went to villages where female infanticide was practiced and was noticeable because there were far more boys than girls in those villages.

I am glad for the work that World Vision is doing in his area and for the work others are doing as well. Stearns quotes a Ghanaian saying: "If you educate a man, your simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation."