Women: Remember Your Potential | The Girl Effect

I was once a little girl.

It’s true.

If you met me in the last few years you might think of me as always having reading glasses, always having lines on my face, and always having a voice that speaks of experience. But that wasn’t always the case.

I was a 5 year old – that’s when I was in kindergarten and lost my virginity at home. I was an 8 year old – that’s when I first learned to balance on a two wheeler and my mom brought lemonade outside for my friends and me. Like all of us, I had both good and bad things happen to me.

But food on the table was never an issue. I did not live in poverty as 60 million girls do around the world. Getting an education was the norm. Working was a right I had. No one forced me to get married at any age, much less get married at the ungodly age of 12.

By 14 years old, more girls are forced to marry in developing countries than all the 14 year old girls you’ve ever known. Ever. Known. In classes. At soccer. At church. At synagogue. At mosque. At temples. Next time you look at your adolescent daughter, or niece, or granddaughter or neighbor, picture her married and pregnant. Then take a deep breath and try to visualize her at the tender age of 15 selling her body to make money for her family.

Unlike me at 15, they’re not dreaming about getting their driver’s lessons the following year. I wonder if they’re dreaming at all.

But there’s hope. 

Given the chance, 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries can unleash the world’s greatest untapped solution to poverty. The Girl Effect. (GirlEffect.org)

If you can release girls living in poverty, the girls themselves will do the rest. They’ll help themselves, their families, their communities.

You can be part of that change. In fact without your help it won’t happen. Join the conversation and let the world know what the Girl Effect is capable of.

Talk it up. Spread the word. (Watch the video when you click that link).

Donate.

Here’s the secret.

The girl effect campaign is actually hundreds of thousands of campaigns. Your campaigns. That’s how change happens.

Check out Marion Chapsal’s post about the difference sanitary pads can make in a girls life. They can be the determinant if she continues to go to school or not.

Here’s another secret. It’s hard to comprehend and believe you can affect 600 million girls in poverty. It’s easier to comprehend when there’s a face – a person to relate to – as in the picture of Aisha, an 18 year old Afghan girl who was mutilated for running away from her abusive husband’s family. (Cover of Time Magazine, July, 2010).

Or perhaps it’s the face of Caylee Anthony who did not live in poverty but was also unable to unleash her potential. She too captured our hearts and minds

I’m sensationalizing aren’t I?

But if it means that more people can imagine a face on each of the 600 million girls across the globe, and, in turn, increase the number of people who get involved then I’ll take the criticism.

Join the other women blog­gers across the globe in sup­port of girls and the Girl Effect with Tara Sophia Mohr’s Girl Effect Blog­ging Cam­paign. The cam­paign is intel­li­gent, cre­ative, emo­tional and solution-centered.

Join the campaign! Write about The Girl Effect at your blog this week, October 4-11, 2011! Mobilize. Give.

“The world could use a big kick in the pants.”