"Experience shows that educated women are more likely to marry later, and have healthy and better-educated children, who will pass on these benefits from one generation to the next."
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General
- The rights of a woman– including her rights to education, to dignity and respect, to adequate health care, to resources and to special care in pregnancy and childbirth – are a priority as such but also represent a crucial and fundamental asset for their children's physical and psychological development.
- Women represent 70% of the people living in extreme poverty and two thirds of the world's 776 million illiterate adults.
- More than 350,000 women die each year - one woman every 90 seconds - from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, most or which could be prevented; 99% of these deaths occur in developing countries.
- 50 million adolescent girls in the world, aged between 15 and 19 years, are married - each year, 16 million girls become mothers. Early marriages are a leading cause of maternal and infant mortality.
- When a mother dies, surviving children are more likely to die early and less likely to attend school or complete their education.
- Access to contraception helps to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and to lower fertility as well as maternal and infant mortality. To this day, about 215 million women in less developed countries do not have access to safe and effective contraceptive methods.
- Children of women with 5 years of primary school education are 40% more likely to live past the age of 5 than children of women with no schooling.
- Educated mother immunise their children 50% more often than mother with no education.
- AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls with a basic school education.
- Compared to men, women spend a higher proportion of their income on their families, especially their children.
"Gender equaliy and the well-being of children are inextricably linked. When women are empowered to lead full and productive lives, children and families prosper. […]. If we care about the health and well-being of children today and into the future, we must work now to ensure that women and girls have equal opportunities to be educated, […], to achieve economic self-sufficiency and to be protected from violence and discrimination."
Ann M. Veneman, former UNICEF Executive Director