Education: Key to Promoting Health and Human Rights
Did you know that around a third of women who give birth today will face violence at the hands of their partner, a violation of human rights that occurs mostly in confined spaces, close to home?.
The Woman Post | Catalina Mejía
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Did you know that sex-selective abortion represents many missing girls and demographic imbalance?
Anne Firth Murray, founder of the Global Fund for Women in 1987 and currently serving as a consulting professor at Stanford University and various civil societies, offers a comprehensive guide to women's health and human rights, available free of charge at the EDX platform. Firth outlines the challenges women face from birth and continues into adolescence and adulthood. In the course of it, which is available on the Stanford Online EDX platform, she explains in depth the challenges that women must face in maintaining their health and exercising their human rights.
According to Anne, women's health cannot be understood without a deep understanding of the relationship between the subordination of women, poverty, violence, which arises as a result of unequal access to education, food, medical care, and paid employment.
Some of the topics covered in the course include preference for male children, domestic violence, refugee women, HIV-AIDS, reproductive health, sex trafficking, and aging. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the course acquires greater relevance, since it covers topics such as the increase in the numbers of women living in poverty, stating that it has increased disproportionately with respect to men, particularly in countries where developing. She explains this, stating that although poverty affects households in general, women and men perform different jobs and are responsible for different tasks within the home, where women face a greater burden, managing consumption, production, and scarcity means. According to the World Bank, the pandemic has affected women's incomes disproportionately and has also increased the frequency and severity of domestic violence against them.
Also read: WHAT STILL EXISTS INEXPLICABLY: FEMALE ABLATION
The most important thing about the course is that it gives the audience the opportunity to learn about how to change the world, investing in girls and adolescents. According to the Population Council, if the 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world today follow the path of school dropouts, early marriage, and early motherhood, and vulnerability to sexual violence and HIV-AIDS, then cycles of poverty will just continue. Firth also mentions that investing in girls' education has the following positive effects:
1. Allows economic growth.
2. It leads to better wages and jobs for women.
3. Save the lives of children and mothers.
4. Leads to smaller, more sustainable families.
5. Results in healthier and better-educated children.
6. Reduces the rates of HIV and malaria.
7. Reduce child marriage rates.
8. Empower women.
9. Increase the political leadership of women.
10. Reduce the damage to families from natural disasters and climate change.
