October 11, is officially sanctioned by the United Nations as the International Day of the Girl. According to the UN, the goal is to address the needs and challenges faced by girls all over the world, while promoting girls’ empowerment.
The Movement:
International Day of the Girl is a world-wide movement that seeks to educate and empower girls to succeed in the workforce. Every year, organizations and activist groups come together to discuss and work to advance the opportunities for girls everywhere.
Under the theme, With Her: A Skilled GirlForce, International Day of the Girl will mark the beginning of a year-long effort to bring together partners and stakeholders to advocate for, and draw attention and investments to, opportunities for girls to attain skills for employ-ability.
The Facts (source: United Nations):
- Roughly 25% of young people – most of them female – are unemployed and uneducated.
- Of the 1 billion young people (including 600 million adolescent girls) that will enter the workforce in the next decade, more than 90% of those living in developing countries will work in the informal sector, where low or no pay, abuse and exploitation are common.
Doing Our Part:
Here at HEXBUG, we’re proud to support this movement by supporting events like GirlPowered. Organized by VEX Robotics and the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation (REC), GirlPowered focuses on empowering women in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM)-related fields.
According to dayofthegirl.org: “women make up about half of the workforce, however, less than 25% of them hold STEM-related jobs.” These are the kinds of statistics that GirlPowered, and other International Day of the Girl events, aim to change.
These events are in place to not only show young women that they can succeed in a male-dominated field, but that they belong there.
Learn how you can join the International Day of the Girl movement by finding a support event in your area, like GirlPowered. Check out some of the sites below for more info on how you can join the movement for #dayofthegirl
- Day of the Girl Summit 2018
- United Nations Women
- Day of the Girl Events
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