Unleashing the Girl Effect
This video explains why investing in girls is a save the world strategy using just words and music. No girls even! I love it and I am planning to use it in a workshop I am doing next week for the gathering of the Women of the ELCA. If you watch the video directly from Youtube — and it is doing well with 63,000 views — there are companion videos that feature girls talking about their lives, like Addis from Ethiopiawho was married to a 40-year-old man at age 12 and had to drop out of school.
Though this is where my training in branding and gender justice collide. I love anything that makes more people aware of how poverty limits the full being of women and girls. But after the feel good music winds down I ask: We are just going to give a girl an education and a cow and everything will be fine? Is it really the obligation of a woman to make a new and visible economic contribution to the village before she is listened to by male leaders?
Well, you can’t get to every issue in a three-minute teaser. But the website could do a better job with linking people into action strategies. Right now it just links to a fact sheet that any 101 student could have assembled. I want to know more of the backstory and forward strategy of this video, it is a collaboration between UN Foundation, Nike Foundation, NOVO, Plan and others.
I’ll have my eye out for more impacts of the girl effect. I hope ripples of girl power are felt round the world.
