Empowering Women and Girls

©UNESCO/NOKIA

Education empowers women and girls. It provides them the ability and knowledge needed to direct their own lives.  When girls receive education they marry later; have smaller and healthier families; gain skills needed to enter the labour market; recognize the importance of health care and seek it for themselves and their children; and know their rights and gain the confidence to insist on them. The virtuous ripple effect of education for girls is so far-reaching that former UN Secretary General and Nobel Prize winner Kofi Annan called it the single most effective tool for development.

UNESCO’s mobile learning program looks directly at how mobile technology—whether in the form of basic handsets or the newest tablet computers—can help nudge the world toward greater gender equity, both in education and beyond it.

Over the past decade there has been a flowering of programs that successfully utilize mobile devices to expand and improve educational opportunities available to women, especially in developing countries where gender inequities are most severe. Specifically, UNESCO is exploring how gender sensitive content and training, literacy support, and skills development can advance the education of women and girls.