In Conversation: Ashley Judd speaks with the
Nike Foundation about their focus on girls and women.
Despite the rhetoric about female empowerment, adolescent girls remain largely under-served in many areas of the world. More than 600 million girls live in developing countries, where they struggle with a myriad of life-threatening issues. Yet, initiatives that address their needs receive less than two percent of development funds. This lack of resources exacerbates the cycle of poverty and poor health, and can cost economies billions of dollars.
That’s why two CGI members, the Nike Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, teamed up with the Center for Global Development to create the Global Health Agenda for Girls. This project aims to ensure that global health policies and practices become responsive to the needs of adolescent girls.
Recently, CGI member Ashley Judd, who serves on the Advisory Council of the Global Health Agenda for Girls, sat down with Lisa MacCallum, Managing Director at the Nike Foundation. They discussed why more development resources should be focused on girls. For more information on the Global Health Agenda for Girls, click here.
Lisa: Ashley, you sit on the board of PSI, an organization that fights malaria around the world, and much of your effort there has focused on adolescent girls and women. Why is this so important to you?
Ashley: It has everything to do with the young girls I meet on my travels. In India, a few years ago, I met a 12-year-old girl named Neelam. Both of her parents had died of AIDS and she was taking care of her younger sister, while working several jobs to survive. Despite these obstacles, she forced herself to go to school in the evenings and now, thanks to her tenacity, she and her sister are on their way to becoming self-sufficient, independent young women.
What Neelam did was remarkable and inspiring. Research has proven that a girl’s education, health, and wealth can have a positive impact on both her family’s livelihood and the community as a whole. I had the opportunity to share some of these stories as a panelist at CGI’s Annual Meeting last year during a special session on adolescent girls. Here, diverse organizations ranging from the Nike Foundation to the Girls’ Power Initiative emphasized that by investing in girls, we’re really investing in the future.
However, ensuring positive outcomes from investments in girls is a difficult task and one that is heavily reliant on the complex interaction between health indicators, such as poverty, hunger, and child mortality. Improving those health indicators for girls is at the core of my work with PSI and at the very heart of my passion.
Ashley: I know a lot of your work, Lisa, is about economically empowering girls. How does that connect to a girl’s health?
Lisa: Economic empowerment is key to a girl’s health. In the most vulnerable areas of the world, poverty creates situations where short-term economic decisions are made. Girls are being pulled out of school early – married off at a young age for a dowry in rural areas or forced to depend on sugar daddies in urban contexts. If she stumbles into adolescence with her body as her only asset, there are dire consequences for her like HIV infection and early pregnancy, both of which directly affect the health of future generations.
Economic empowerment changes the equation for a girl. It creates an incentive to protect her from threats to her health and it means her body is no longer her only form of income. We have to transfer assets – human, social and financial capital – to girls at an earlier age if we want to impact global health.
Lisa: As a PSI board member, what have you seen that proves to be most effective in combating female disempowerment?
Ashley: Effective, community-based health interventions must come from the heart of the community and specifically target girls and women. While traditionally disenfranchised, girls are able to become the most powerful agents of change if given the opportunity.
One of the most compelling examples of this comes from one of our programs in the red-light district of Mumbai, India, where girls often sold by their families are forced into a life of sex work. There, we developed a community-based, female-run advocacy program that provides female sex workers with the skills and knowledge necessary to break free from the vicious cycle of poverty and prostitution.
The hope born out of this program for other young girls is something I carry with me always.
Ashley: Looking ahead, how can we all do a better job of working together to increase our impact?
Lisa: Systemic change is required at all levels of development. We’ve boiled this down to four basic lessons:
- We need specific solutions for girls. The unique needs of girls are getting lost in the broader focus on women and youth, so we have to be specific about solutions for girls. For example, girls are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s and they have less access to health and social services.
- Invest directly. Investing in girls doesn’t mean investing only in girls. Take a look at your current programs and figure out whether they directly reach vulnerable adolescent girls. No matter your focus, girls can be a powerful part of the solution, or accentuate your problem.
- It’s urgent. Get to her by 12. She arrives at adolescence in a pretty healthy state, and it goes sideways from there. If we don’t reach her by age 12, we will be investing in a treatment cycle rather than more cost-effective prevention methods.
- Count her. Regardless of institutional size, ask for your reports and your data to be disaggregated by age, gender and marital status at a minimum. Girls will remain invisible in development efforts until we demand to see them.
Furthermore, there is a need for organizations involved in this field, from both the public and private sectors, to join forces to address this issue more effectively. For instance, at CGI’s Annual Meeting last year, the World bank and the Nike Foundation jointly launched the Adolescent Girls Initiative – an innovative public-private partnership that will improve economic opportunities for adolescent girls in post-conflict Liberia.
The Initiative’s first pilot project in Liberia, also funded by the Danish Government and championed on the ground by the Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is built on a new model that links skills training to labor demands. More than 1,500 girls will acquire key technical and life-skills by participating in training opportunities that will enhance their access to productive employment, and enable them overcome the social barriers that too often hinder their ability to participate.
The Initiative is also being expanded to include Rwanda, Afghanistan, Nepal and South Sudan, which means there’s plenty of room for public- and private-sector partners who are looking to have massive impact.
Lisa: Hence, this shows that we have a lot to look forward to, don’t we?
Ashley: Yes, there are great opportunities on the horizon, including the Global Health Agenda for Girls, which will hopefully provide us with a road map to put girls at the center of some of the problem solving for health issues.
Lisa: We’re thrilled you’ve decided to join us — and other advisors like Melinda Gates and Muhammad Yunus — to serve on the Advisory Council. We’re excited to be bringing together this group of champions. We look forward to engaging more voices in this critical dialogue in the future.
