Why Women Helping Women?

Maternal Mortality

One woman dies every two minutes from pregnancy-related causes.
99 percent of all maternal deaths occur in the developing world.
More than 1 million children a year are left motherless due to maternal mortality.
135 million girls living today have undergone female genital mutilation, greatly increasing their risk of maternal mortality.

One in five women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.
102 countries have no specific legal provisions against domestic violence, and in at least 53 countries, marital rape is not a prosecutable offense.
60 million girls are “missing” due to selective abortion of female fetuses and the mistreatment and neglect of female children.

Estimates for children in sexual slavery range from 300,000 to as high as 1.2 million.
The typical age of entry into the sex trade is 13 or 14 years old.
51 million girls have been married before the age of consent.
Trafficking yields $9 billion in the U.S. and generates $27.8 billion in profits worldwide each year.
Some studies suggest that there are as many as 27 million modern slaves – more than at any point in history and 56 percent are women.

Two-thirds of the 781 million illiterate adults in the developing world are women.
Nearly one out of every five girls in the developing world who enrolls in primary school does not complete her primary education.
75 percent of un-enrolled girls are from ethnic minorities or very poor families, despite being only 20 percent of the population.
A child born to a literate woman is 50 percent more likely to survive past the age of 5.
Young women’s earnings will be 10 to 20 percent higher for each additional year in school.
70 percent of the world’s poor are women and girls.
Women earn less than 10 percent of the world’s wages but work more than two-thirds of the world’s working hours.
Women reinvest approximately 90 percent of their income in their families.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women own less than 2 percent of the land, but produce 90 percent of the food.
If women’s paid employment rates increased to the level of men’s, U.S. GDP would rise 9 percent.

There has been a great deal of injustice done to more than 50 percent of the world’s population. And we need to do something about it.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu