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2024.10.11
Seoul
International Day of the Girl
Jaqueline Perez Gamboa
The United Nations General Assembly declared October 11 the International Day of the Girl Child, also known as the Day of the Girl, through Resolution 66/170 in December 2011. Since then, this day has served as a crucial platform to visualize and protect the rights of all girls and adolescents worldwide, bringing attention to their daily challenges.
This generation of girls and adolescents faces challenges such as climate change, political conflicts, war, poverty, and gender equality crisis, as well as the denial of their human rights in some regions of the world.
For instance, at least 15% of the girls in the world become mothers before 18 years old and or are being forced to marry before the same age. According to UNICEF, 1 in 4 of these girls have experienced violence in any of its forms: physical, psychological, economic, or sexual. In terms of education, 1 in 5 girls do not complete secondary school, and 4 out of 10 obtain a higher level of education. Most girls spend double their time on house chores or are in charge of domestic labor without payment.
The Summit of the Future outcome documents (2024) affirm that this generation of children and young people is the largest in history, mainly concentrated in developing countries. Because of this, governments, societies, and NGOs need to focus their policies and actions on the knowledge that girls and adolescents have the right, as every other person, to a life with dignity, meaning they have the right to be educated and cared as any other member of society, recognizing and encouraging them to become, in the future, empowered women capable of change the world they are living in.
For this aim, the UN has developed several lines of action, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, which marks achieving gender equality and women's empowerment in every 17 goals of the mentioned agenda. Similarly, UNICEF has launched "Building Back Equal, with and for Adolescent Girls: A Programme Strategy for UNICEF 2022-2025," through which they adopt several compromises toward gender equality to change the actual data worldwide.
Along with governmental actions, NGOs like Amnesty International work hand in hand with society to provide several lines of action to protect girls' rights and eradicate genre violence executed on girls and adolescents. Specifically, Amnesty International is mainly working on African, Middle East, and Latin American cases. Their focus is violence derived from armed conflicts, poverty, and inequality.
Girls must be guaranteed access to a life without violence, a quality education, and labor equity through empowering them. To achieve this, the entire society must join and participate in the efforts made so far to protect girls and adolescents worldwide so that they can continue changing the world we live in, for the better.
Written by Jaqueline Perez Gamboa for Yonsei GSIS Human Rights Hub
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