The Solution

You’ve read about the problem. There is a solution.

Experts agree that education is the greatest hope children living in poverty have for a better life. Education can help break the cycle of poverty.

An education can ...

  • Provide enough food to eat and better living conditions – education gives these students a chance to get a better job that will help them provide for themselves, and their families. To them, that doesn’t mean a nice house, or a cool car. It means enough food to eat every day. And maybe a house without a leaky roof.

  • Reduce the number of children dying from preventable diseases - educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who did not receive an education.

  • Reduce the number of people with AIDS – AIDS spreads twice as quickly among girls who have not received an education than among girls that have even some schooling.

  • Save lives – the children of a woman who has at least finished fifth grade have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women who have not received an education.

Wow – an education can help solve a lot of the problems of poverty you read about.

 

The only problem is that today -
100 million of these kids didn’t get to go to school.

That’s probably hard to understand since you had to go to school, right?

There are many reasons why they can’t go to school, but the most common is:
They can’t afford it.

That probably doesn’t make sense to you because you think public schools are free, so what is there to afford?

In many countries, school fees and uniforms are required even for public schools.
That’s two things to pay for.

On top of that, they have to buy school supplies, and pay bus fare to get to school and then home again. And, bus fare alone can easily be half of their parents’ income.
Two more things to pay for.

That’s at least four things they have to pay for.

Many of these families can’t afford enough food to eat every day, which means they definitely can’t pay these school fees.

If they can't afford these things, they simply can’t go to school. Unfortunately, it’s just not free.

And millions of families can’t pay for it, every day.

So, education is their greatest hope – their best chance of working their way out of extreme poverty. But, right now, so many of these girls and boys, youth your age, don’t even get to go to school.

They need to go to school, and they want to go to school.

 

Can we help them? Yes! It’s easy to help. You can make a difference.