If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
Interpretation
Educating girls is essential for improving health and reducing infant mortality in a culture.
Greg Mortenson emphasizes that education for girls is a critical factor in transforming a culture to address fundamental issues such as hygiene, health care, and high rates of infant mortality. By empowering girls through education, communities can significantly enhance their overall well-being and futures.
In practice
During a women's empowerment workshop, the facilitator quoted Mortenson to inspire attendees.
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.
You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.
If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.
In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.
If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.
I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.
We inculcate young people with the message that if they don't succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.
For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.
In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power.
There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.
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