Stand Up for Girls with LitWorld.org
Bonbon Break is teaming up with LitWorld to support #StandUp4Girls October 11. Share this story, download the #StandUp4Girls sign and join us on Instagram in showing your support for reading, education and girls worldwide.
Don’t forget to use the #StandUpforGirls hashtag!
Click here to download your own sign.
Around the world, the number of people who cannot read or write hovers just under 800 million. Two thirds of this population are women and girls. LitWorld’s Stand Up for Girls campaign in honor of the October 11th Day of the Girl mobilizes girls and boys, men and women to advocate for every girl’s right to tell her story to change the world.
It is truly a matter of life and death when girls are denied the right to read and write and to learn all that they need and want to know. In developing countries, 1 in 7 girls marries before the age of 15, and pregnancy and childbirth are the number one killer of 15-19-year-old girls. The right to literacy is a form of protection. People who can read to understand their choices, and write to define them and to share them are powerful in a civil society.
Why invest in girls’ literacy? As stated so eloquently by Gordon Brown, literacy is the goal of goals, a foundational human right from which all other freedoms can be attained. The right to literacy is a form of protection, allowing girls to understand their choices, and write to define them and to share them. The benefits of educating girls reap better health and economic outcomes for family, community and society as a whole.
LitWorld was launched in 2007 to empower the most isolated, at-risk and impoverished communities with a new vision of what literacy could mean to each and every person. At the heart of literacy is this: that stories and words are a mirror and a window. The girls in our Clubs read and write to find out who they are, to see that stories can inspire them, and make them feel less alone. They can read and write to look out at the world, to imagine it as one of possibility for themselves and for their families. Through these programs, the world becomes a hopeful place.
Everyone can get involved in building the “safety net” for girls worldwide. Individuals hold tremendous power, and if we all stand up together for the human right of literacy the potential for rapid change is amplified exponentially.
So stand up for your mother, your mentor, your friend or your daughter. Stand up and raise your voice for educational rights. Use social media to tell friends and about the global education crisis and the Stand Up for Girls movement. Write letters to newspapers and politicians. Get involved with organizations like LitWorld that are leading the youth movement for education rights and find wonderful ways to do this work on the ground, every day, all around the world.
All of the resources that you need to lead the Stand Up for Girls movement in your community are available at litworld.org. Together we will carry forward the stories of girls who could be and should be able to live out all of their dreams.
