Blog Archive

African governments should coordinate action to improve laws, education, health care, and public awareness to end child marriage. Forty percent of girls in sub-Saharan Africa marry before age 18, and African countries account for 15 of the 20 countries with the highest rates of child marriage. Child marriage has dire lifelong consequences, often severely reducing a girl’s ability to realize a wide range of human rights. Marrying early often ends a girl’s education, exposes her to domestic and sexual violence, increases serious health risks and death from early childbearing and HIV.

Have you ever heard children telling you they want their education to stop when they reach the end of primary school? Many organizations have interviewed scores of children from all countries and they've never seen that they've said that. But unfortunately sometimes kids are forced out of school after primary school. For many of these children, having their education stopped short at the end of primary school was tragic. For some, external factors such as violence or discrimination forced them to drop out.

A new report from China’s education ministry says the government has achieved its goal to build one special education school for every 300,000 people across the country. Beijing has spent US $836 million on “the largest special education school construction project since the founding” of the People’s Republic of China by building and expanding more than 1,000 such schools. It also claims that in these schools, there are increasing numbers of teachers trained to work with children with disabilities and that the student-teacher ratios are improving. But is this really a good thing?

In an article I read this week, a 20 year old #@$%anese woman spoke about her life. She talked about being accused of not being “girly enough,” and how she was frequently swarmed by students and beaten with a roll of paper. Her teachers witnessed the abuse again and again but did nothing. She begged her junior high classmates for help -- but they told her to endure the abuse, that high school would be easier. She said that this was too commonly the case in #@$%an, as is the case in many places around the world.