Support for Girls
The life of girls in sub-Saharan Africa is strongly shaped while they are still young. In many developing countries, girls are married at the age of 14 and shortly afterwards they already expect their first child. More then 14 million girls between 15 and 19 years of age give birth every year (more >). Teenage pregnancies do not only force them to quit school but also brings along great health hazards: Teenage girls have a doubled risk to die during pregnancy or birth.
With our development projects and advocacy work, DSW increases awareness in Europe and in Africa itself and advocates for educational opportunities. Our objective is to break through the circuit of unwanted pregnancy, school dropouts, unemployment and poverty. We aim to empower women and adolescents to live a healthy and self-chosen life.
DSW Brussels: Advancing Opportunities for Girls and Young Women
- Photo: JLogan, CC licence BY-SA 3.0
Gender equality serves as a cross-cutting issue in DSW’s work: an essential ingredient of all of our activities, at all levels of policy-making. In advocating on the importance of youth and adolescent health and rights, there is a special need to focus on the role of girls. Empowering girls to make decisions for their own health and sexuality can positively affect health and fertility trends in a country, and help lead towards good development.
Ensuring that the importance of girls’ empowerment is not ignored among donors and policy makers, DSW is advancing the opportunities of girls and young women on the international stage. Promoting gender budget lines within the EU’s financial instruments is an important part of this work, but so too is changing the content of policies: this requires a recognition in policy and practise of the underlying obstacles—cultural, political and traditional—which systematically constrain the ability of women to serve as agents of change.
In 2010, the Council of the European Union adopted a new Plan of Action on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Development. DSW is actively monitoring the implementation of this plan, and assessing how well issues of gender equality are ‘mainstreamed’ (or integrated) into the EU’s development cooperation, funding—and above all—action. Targeting the greater environment, and establishing mechanisms for girl’s opportunities and rights to be promoted in all aspects of development cooperation, are both substantively helping to achieve MDGs 3 and 5, as well as offering the necessary support to girls to make empowered decisions.
