Educating Girls, Changing the World
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March 8 marks International Women's Day, a day to recognize the challenges women around the world face and the opportunities that are still out of reach for so many. One of the most pressing issues? Education. According to the UN, 130 million girls around the world are denied access to education. For Council Emerging Leaders Program alumna Amy Maglio, this issue is personal.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, she witnessed how transformative education can be when she helped her host sister attend school for the first time. “I thought about all the girls that I knew in that situation who were not able to get the education that they needed,” she told the Council.
Determined to make a difference, she founded the Women's Global Education Project 21 years ago. Since then, her organization has helped over 50,000 girls and boys in rural parts of Africa gain access to education and training.
We spoke with Amy about the power of education to change lives and what continues to drive her work today.
Interview Summary
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What would you say are the biggest gaps in global efforts to achieve gender equality? And where do you see the most urgent need for change? Where I see the most urgent need for change in terms of gender equality is really focusing at the grassroots level. The reason our program is so effective is that we can do what I'm calling hyper-micro development, where we partner with local communities. So, working with men, working with women, working with all the stakeholders in that community, and as peers but not as outsiders.
Your grassroots approach has actually been recognized as a best practice by the UN Girls Education Initiative. What makes this approach so effective? Number one, we focus on women and girls. Mothers have such a pivotal role in their family, they are the ones making decisions about the well-being of the family, the safety of the family, the nutrition of the family. So, when you focus on women and girls, you're impacting that woman, but also her entire family. Secondly, we provide a very holistic approach to education. It's not just about building a school or providing a scholarship, it's really wraparound services for girls. We're addressing all of the reasons that they're dropping out of school—things like early marriage, early pregnancy. The third thing is that we partner with local community-based organizations, where we're working to really help them figure out how to support more girls in their community and give them the tools that they need to be implementers on the ground.
You've dedicated over two decades to international development and gender equality. What continues to drive and inspire you today? Every time I go back to the field, I meet girls who say without this program they would not be where they are today, whether that be in the eighth grade, whether that be graduating from university, whether that be a teacher or a lawyer or an engineer or a midwife in the community. And also what inspires me to do this work every day, is being able to support those leaders on the ground. They have taken this organization and these initiatives to new levels that I never even thought were possible.
