Female illiteracy doomed thanks to mobile phones Vodafone has partnered with education activist Malala Yousafzai in an effort to bring mobile-based literacy learning to the 493 million women and 76 million girls globally that cannot read or write. 16-year-old Yousafzai will formally make the announcement that her charitable Malala Fund is collaborating with the Vodafone Foundation this evening at the mobile operators Connected Women Summit in London. Yousafzai suffered a brutal shooting at the hands of the Taliban in the northwestern Swat valley in 2012 for her public education activism for girls in the region. She has been living in Birmingham since the attack, where she received treatment. But upon recovery she has continued to speak out on the issues that so deeply affected her home town of Mingora. In January she was forced to cancel an event to launch her memoir, I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education, in northwest Pakistan because of pressure from the regional government, and it is this kind of cultural and social control that the Vodafone Foundation-Malala Fund hopes to battle through online learning and greater mobile connectivity. Speaking about the collaboration, Vodafone Foundation director Andrew Dunnett, Director commented: Getting a mobile for the first time can change a womans life forever, and preventing the gender gap from widening would yield a significant economic benefit. We look forward to working with the Malala Fund to give more women the knowledge and skills to take greater control of their lives and increase their participation in the workforce. Dunnett alluded to the Foundations newly released report, which estimates that connecting more women globally on mobile phones could help pull 5.3 million out of illiteracy by 2020, and as a knock-on effect help reduce the number of domestic violence attacks perpetrated against women by 80,000 during the same time frame. The latter can be deduced from an increased access to the right information, an increased sense of empowerment through education and access to mobile crisis alert systems. Vodafone has already joined with Olympic boxing medallist Mary Kom on the development of a free SMS-based self-defence tips service. The reports proposals are based on statistics Vodafone has gathered that reveal 300 million fewer women have access to a mobile phone globally, and 91 million of those affected live in markets Vodafone operates in (a figure due to rise to 142 million by 2020) and will therefore have access to. For our industry this represents a massive unfulfilled market, but much more importantly, as mobile becomes more central to our lives, this gap contributes to the unfulfilled potential of many millions of womens lives, commented Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao. The report points to the global financial benefits of increasing connectivity among women in developing regions, with coauthor Linda Scott of the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford noting that the IMF estimates the labour gender gap reduces GDP growth. According to a report by Deloitte and the GSM Association, GDP in developing countries may increase by 1.2 percent for every 10 percent hike in mobile penetration, and Vodafone has used this to calculate a potential benefit of future Vodafone Foundation-Malala Fund work of $6.6 billion (£3.9 billion) annually by 2020. It estimates 17 percent of women would have benefit from increased employment as a direct consequence of increased literacy, resulting in a $3.4 billion (£2 billion) global productivity increase in 2020. Retaining girls through secondary school is now believed to be the most powerful and rapid intervention available to promote national prosperity, comments Scott. In many developing countries, however, girls are withdrawn from school at the primary level, and few who go on to secondary education complete it. This is true of millions of young women like Yousafzai, that cannot attend school either because of cultural and religious concerns, or the dangers these social constructs pose to anyone that attempts to challenge them.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:09:30 +0000
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