Jordan Gathers
Sister Kush
Plenary Session
November 6 2014
To Educate a Girl
The documentary film, To Educate a Girl, takes a ground-up and visually stunning view of education through the eyes of girls in Nepal and Uganda. Both of these countries continue to struggle with internal conflict and dealing with vast poverty. In Nepal, Manisha, a teenager who works in the fields while her three younger sisters go to school, is contrasted by three young listeners of a hugely popular youth-oriented radio program. We learn how the program has helped them deal with issues of early marriage and poverty in order to stay in school. In Uganda, we meet Mercy, the six-year-old daughter of an impoverished single mother who is about to embark on her first day of school, and Sarah, a teenage war orphan who is haunted by a tragic past but still managing to study. Through the experiences of girls out of school, starting school or fighting against the odds to stay in school, To Educate a Girl depicts a compelling look at the lives of young women who are striving to achieve their dreams in the face of conflict, poverty and gender bias.
To Educate a Girl places the conversation about education within a global setting. There are millions of children around the world not even in school, and the experiences of these girls in particular shows how many navigate culture, poverty, and gender bias in order to access even the most basic education. In the year 2000, one hundred and ten million children in the world were not in school and two thirds of them were girls. In 2010 filmmakers Frederick Rendina and Oren Rudavsky traveled to Nepal and Uganda, two countries emerging from conflict and struggling with poverty, to find the answer to one question: What does it take to educate a girl? Framed by the United Nations global initiative to provide equal access to education for girls by 2015, To Educate a Girl takes a ground-up and visually stunning view of that effort through the eyes of girls out of school, starting school or fighting against the odds to stay in school. From volunteers going door to door in southern Nepal to a “back to school” march that brings an entire community together in northern Uganda, a stirring picture of grassroots efforts to help girls get a decent education is brought to light. To Educate a Girl is a compelling look at the lives of young women who are striving to achieve their dreams in the face of conflict, poverty and gender bias.
Nepali women don't have equal rights. Nepalese women are said to have all domestic responsibilities. Their culture believes they should be doing all the house work, feeding the children, cleaning the house, taking care of the live stocks and domestic animals, washing dishes, and doing laundry. Men are said to have no part in doing anything around the house; they are not expected to do dishes or do laundry. Women are also expected to take care of husband's family; their mother, brothers and sisters. In many cases her works are never rewarded nor appreciated; everyone complains, the kids, husband, and the husband's mothers and sisters. While all of life’s decisions are made by Nepali man, the wife goes about her daily monotonous life, in her home and backyard, she works harder than men and thus dies earlier. Did you know that Nepal is the only country in the world where a woman's life expectancy is shorter than a man’s? That’s an interesting statistics considered that men’s jobs are more strenuous than those of women’s
