Educating our young girls is the foundation for Nigeria's growth and development.
Interpretation
Investing in the education of girls is crucial for the overall progress of Nigeria.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala highlights the vital role that educating young girls plays in the advancement of Nigeria as a nation. This quote emphasizes that when girls are given the opportunity to learn and grow intellectually, it not only empowers them but also drives societal progression, economic stability, and sustainable development for the entire country.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for educational reforms in Nigeria.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death.
It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
To look into some aspects of the future, we do not need projections by supercomputers. Much of the next millennium can be seen in how we care for our children today. Tomorrow's world may be influenced by science and technology, but more than anything, it is already taking shape in the bodies and minds of our children.
I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.
I wanted to be the exception to the other kids, but in the right way._x000D_ _x000D_ We have a lot of suffering in our part of the world, but that suffering is, in a way, a blessing. _x000D_ _x000D_ Obviously, I could not afford to go to school without a scholarship, so that meant I had to excel in order to get one.
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