Malala Yousafzai has highlighted the impact of coronavirus on girls’ education globally, highlighting that millions will have dropped out after schools are fully reopened.
Things will not go to normal after the coronavirus is fully dealt with for the majority of people around the world. The devastating economic toll this pandemic has caused will last for generations, especially for girls who come from poor countries.
Malala Yousafzai, in an Op-Ed published in the Guardian, highlights that the pandemic has laid bare the inequality and fragility of the systems built in many countries. She stated that, beyond the impact the virus has had on the health care system, the world also faces an emergency in addressing the disparity that exists in the education fund.
Malala Yousafzai fight for equality
The co-founder of Malala Fund, Malala Yousafzai, has been an avid advocate of education for years, winning a Nobel Peace Prize at just 17 years.
The Malala Fund estimated that, globally, over 20 million girls are at risk of failing to continue with their education once the schools reopen. The estimation used the rate of dropout during the Ebola outbreak and indicated that the current pandemic was on pace to set new records of girls dropout. Poorer countries will also be in a bad position of providing quality education to their students based on the economic devastation the virus has caused.
450 million students left behind
Since the pandemic began, distance learning has been hailed as a solution in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. However, conservative figures from Learning Solutions shows that the method of learning still left behind over 450 million students. Unesco figures also showed that the funding of education will widen by over $200 billion globally.
Malala Yousafzai noted that the school dropout would add to the huge number of girls that are already out of school, estimated to be more than 129 million globally. She also noted that millions of other girls attend schools but barely hit the minimum performance requirements due to a lack of resources.
Malala highlighted the situation that had led her to quit school while she was younger and why she had decided to commit her life to fight for girls around the world who are in a similar position as she was. She said her goals were to ensure that girls’ education was given the same importance as that of a boy child in order to reduce the current disparity between the two.
Featured image by NobelPrize
