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.
Gender Based Violence
- 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.
Sex Trafficking and Forced Prostitution
- 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.
Educating Women and Girls
- 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