How Education Changes Lives

(NC) Education is one of the most important investments a county can make both in its people and its future. Not only does it give people critical skills and tools to better provide for themselves and create opportunities for a nation’s economic growth but it helps to fight the spread of disease, improve health and reduce poverty.

Consider these staggering facts about the powerful effects of education:

• If all women had a secondary education, child deaths would be cut in half, saving 3 million lives.

• 12 million children would be saved from stunting from malnutrition.

• There would be two thirds fewer child marriages.

• Increasing the number of women completing a secondary education by just 1% would raise a country’s economic growth by 0.3 per cent.

• Each additional year of a mother’s schooling can reduce the prevalence of diseases like pneumonia and measles by 14 per cent.

• If all women had a secondary education, early births could fall by 59 per cent, and mortality for children under 5 would fall by 49 per cent.

Not only that, an educated mother is more likely to send her own children to school. Education affects not only women’s families but their communities, their countries and ultimately, the globe.

Organizations like Reach a Hand Uganda, sponsored by Beautiful World Canada, enable young African women to change their futures through education. More information about this organization is available at www.beautifulworld.org.