Jennifer Buffett from the NoVo Foundation writes for the Huffington Post.
At the NoVo Foundation, we know that prioritizing girls and women is one of the most fundamentally sound methods of changing our world for the better. We've learned that helping girls and women help themselves raises living standards for everyone.
Each year a girl stays in school boosts her future income by 10 to 20 percent. And since girls and women are likely to invest 90 percent of their income in their families — as opposed to a man’s 30 to 40 percent — the education and empowerment of girls and women has an impact that ripples across a society.
So what happens to girls early in their life makes a huge difference. On a learning trip to Ethiopia, where 49 percent of girls are married before they are 18, I came face to face with one of the biggest challenges that holds back the world’s female population and keeps countries mired in poverty: child marriage.
Read the full article at the Huffington Post.