Educate a girl in a developing nation and it’ll make life better for us here in the US. That’s what we’ll be discussing today

Hi I’m Dave and thanks for joining me today on Running My Mouth Off about Climate Change, a podcast that’s dedicated to the aspects of climate change that don’t really make it onto the home pages of the major news outlets but are nevertheless really impactful and pretty darn important.

Before I get started, I’m choosing to break this down into two separate podcasts because there’s so much stuff, contextual, experiential, theoretical…. That fitting all of this into a single podcast might, well, impact my personal sanity, so here we go with part one. 

So educating girls in developing nations, makes our existence better by helping the climate. And, if you’re like me, you’re thinking, “what the heck does educating girls in developing nations have to do with climate change?” Well, quite a lot actually. There’s an international research organization called Project Drawdown, that released a book which is basically a comprehensive plan to combat climate change. And, in the book, they listed the 80 most impactful things that we could be doing right now to combat climate change.  And, on that list, educating girls came in at number six, meaning that, according to them, it’s the sixth most effective thing that we could be doing to turn the tide on climate change. By the way, for those of you looking at Teslas and Rivians now, or that really cool Lotus that came out for a paltry $3.2mil? EV’s came in at number 29. Think about that for a minute: number 29, vs number 6. Project Drawdown estimates that, by educating girls, we could see a reduction of 51.48 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the same mass as 515,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers. The Empire State Building weighs .00003 Gigatonnes, and all of the people currently on earth come in at a weight of .06 Gigatonnes, So 51.48? That’s a fairly significant number. And to further strengthen the point, educating girls, according to project Drawdown can have a greater impact than solar farms, wind turbines and plant-rich diets combined. As cool as EV’s are, especially that new 2023 Lotus, EV manufacturers can’t make that same claim. 

You’ll hear me refer to Project Drawdown quite a bit today and their numbers aren’t really things that are primarily based on ideology, emotion or pulled out of some random theoretical hat. These guys are professional smart people and I do really tend to trust their numbers. If you’ve got some time, go to ProjectDrawdown.org and spend some time there, you’ll see what I’m talking about.  It seems like really impressive organization and there’s a ton of good stuff there. 

But I digress, back to the education stuff.

So how does this all work, how does it happen? I break it down into three basic ways that I’ll call Family, Food, and Voice. And I realize that probably sounds a bit nebulous so let’s start with Family or, more accurately, Family Planning. But before we dive into how things can be, let’s spend a few minutes talking about how things are right now.  

In many areas of the world, girls don’t have much of a choice about how they’re going to spend their future, how they’re going to live their lives; they do what they’re told, they do their “duty”; and they typically get married at a very young age to the first guy that comes along. And, once married, they wind up having a bunch of kids, because that’s what they’re supposed to do, that’s their cultural norm. And when I say a bunch of kids, understand that, in many situations, kids are needed to help with all of the work that needs to be done, to simply survive as a community; more bodies means that more work can be done, whether it’s farming, housework, selling things like water or food, and more work done can make a day to day existence just that much easier. And, odds are, the more kids you have, the better you’ll be taken care of as age starts to impact your ability to work and earn a living; a lot of kids can be a good thing when you hit retirement age and you haven’t made enough money to survive, which is pretty much the norm in most of these developing nations. And, when you factor in things like high infant mortality rates, illnesses and unhealthy diets, you really can’t have, say, 4 kids and expect to have 4 productive bodies in the house. So you’ll need to have more.

Again, this is what happens when people, and we’re talking about girls here, don’t have a lot of opportunity in life. And keep in mind that most of these societies are strongly patriarchal, to a degree that we really can’t relate to here in the US, and women obey what their husbands tell them to do, simply because it’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s a thing that’s deeply engrained in culture; basically, whatever the guy wants, he gets. And, if the husband wants more kids, more kids will be had, no discussion.

By the way, spousal rape is also a big thing. I’m going to take a slight detour for accuracy of context. My first hand experience in all of this stuff, my own personal observations, are mainly based upon the experiences that I’ve had Indonesia. I work with a few factories over there and have been there quite a few times and have become quite adept in absolutely butchering their language, but I’ve seen a lot. And knowing a bit about how and why things work the way they do over there, I tend to believe that there’s a great deal of cross over when it comes to the how’s and why’s in other developing nations. There seems to be enough commonalities in these countries for me to believe that this stuff is true, it’s a thing, whenever you go. But spousal rape, yes, it’s one of those things. And, though it’s technically illegal in Indonesia, it’s rarely reported, because the husband is a guy, and the wife needs to listen to him. It’s incredibly sad, and I could go on for a while on why I think it’s a thing, but that’s not why I’m here today. 

So when we look at educating girls, it’s not just something that’s good for us if we plan on inhabiting this earth for a while, it’s also a human rights thing, it’s a thing that’s just, really good thing to do.

But it’s about options, about giving women more of a say in how they’re able to live their lives. As it is, in most cases, women don’t have the necessary skills to make it on their own, let alone provide for themselves and their families, they’re left with accepting the first marriage proposal that comes along, and living whatever life that comes out of that. Keep in mind that, in some of these countries, marriage proposals can come really quickly after the two meet, in fact I’ve seen this, it’s not uncommon to see that happen in a just a week or two.  There’s the idea that the two will date and get to know each other after they get married, which seems a bit odd to me. So they’re stuck, generation after generation because, it’s just how things work.

Education girls changes all of this.

Before I jump into how this happens, let me first say that educating boys in these countries is a good thing, but if you educate boys only, studies show that not a lot happens, for whatever reason. In my opinion, based on my observations, it seems that boys, being raised in this male dominated environment, get used to having things done their way, or getting pretty much what they want. And their mom’s, well, they’re just moms who want to give their kids what they want; these kids are their babies, how do you say no? And the moms have also been raised and steeped in this society so babying their boys too much for too long, as natural as it feels, can result in some pretty demanding men later on. 

I think there’s also a danger that comes with educating boys only in that there’s the possibility of a reinforcement and strengthening of the male dominated status quo, I think it can give them even more of a leg-up over women than they already have, gives them a stronger platform to say, “Look, I’m a guy, you’re a girl, and I’m smarter than you, so you need to listen, not argue, play your role and do what I say.” Keep in mind though that this is merely an “it seems to me” opinion, I have no data to back that up, it’s just how it seems to me. But again, educating boys is definitely not a bad thing, but they tend not to do a whole lot with the knowledge that they gain in school. So we educate them, and not a lot changes. 

Girls, on the other hand? Education is a game changer. 

Study after study confirms that girls who have had at least a secondary level of education have more options in life, and they actively take advantage of those. They’re empowered to so something in life other than “their duty”, and actively take advantage of having more knowledge. Educated girls tend to have more of a choice in who they marry and when they marry, it’s typically when they’re older, they and wind up having fewer children. And their children are a lot more likely to go to school themselves, which perpetuations a really, really good cycle. 

But listen to a few of these facts when it comes to educated women and their children, and there are a lot more, far more than I can count, I just found these particularly interesting. The first two are about HIV, and the next few are about actually have children

• A study in Zambia finds that HIV spreads twice as fast among uneducated girls.10 

• A study in Uganda demonstrated that each additional year of education for girls reduces their chances of contracting HIV by 6.7 percent.11

And here’s a few about education’s impact on having children: 

• A 35-year study in Guatemala found a link between the years girls spent in school and the timing of childbearing. For each additional year a young woman spent in school, the age at which she had her first child was delayed approximately six to 10 months.2

• A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past the age of 5 than a child born to an illiterate woman.5 

• In Indonesia, child vaccination rates are 19 percent when mothers who have no education. This figure increases to 68 percent when mothers have at least secondary school education.6

• In Bangladesh and Indonesia, the odds of having a child who is shorter than average for its age decreases by around 5 percent for every additional year of formal education a mother has.7

In fact, a study in Mali, which is in Western Africa, observed that educated women had an average of 3 children, and women with no education went on to have 7 children. For a little more perspective, it’s been estimated in many studies that, if we focus on educating girls today, there will be at least 150 million fewer people on the planet by 2050. Let that sink in, 150 million. How many fewer people does that represent by 2070, or 2090 when the children of the children born today have even more children? The answer? A lot. 

For comparison, that’s more than the total population of Russia today, and more than three times the population of the entire of California. 

And, more than 75mil times the population of Hibberts Gore, Maine, and Monowi, Nebraska combined. By the way, each of those towns has a population of 1. And if anybody moves into one of those towns, my stats will get really messed up. 

But population is kind of the main point when it comes to the family planning aspect of educating girls and the climate; fewer bodies on the earth, the need for fewer bodies. And I realize that I said that having a lot of kids for some of these families can be a good thing, but realistically, when you change the educational link in the chain, everything else downstream changes. 

There are quite a few professionals out there who spend their career studying and trying to figure out exactly how many people this planet can support. And there are a lot of different figure that get thrown out. Some say that we’ve already eclipsed the number, while others say that the earth can effectively support another 5 billion people, provided we’re comfortable existing on a steady and absolutely delicious diet of cockroaches and locusts. Though there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement on what that actual number is, there is strong agreement that the course we’re on is not really a good one. The earth has over 8 billion people on it now. That’s over 8 billion consumers and carbon emitters. By the way, that’s up from 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and 6.9 billion in the year 2010. That’s a pretty alarming trajectory, and it needs desperately to be slowed down, if not reversed. And again, giving girls an education globally, it’s probably, just one of those things that needs to happen, for a lot of reasons. 

That’s not to say that it’s easy, there are actually quite a few challenges associated with it, which I’ll get into next week. But there are a lot of organizations out there who are able to effectively navigate these challenges and do a pretty good job giving some of these girls hope in life. One in particular, called Together Women Rise, is doing a lot of cool stuff and and has a ton of really great success stories. If you’re interested, they’re at TogetherWomenRise.org so check them out Now, I’m not in any way affiliated with them, they don’t even know that I exist. I do like their story and vibe though, and how effective they are at getting their message out.  But I’m sure they’d appreciate your support if you’re so inclined. Again, there are quite a few organizations who do this, so if you decide that this is a thing that you want to become involved with on some level, I can think of few things that would deliver such amazing returns, in so many ways for so many people. 

I’ve seen this work first hand, seen the lives, the difference that education makes between a woman who doesn’t have it, and one who does, and that difference can be as opposite as night and day, it’s impossible to emphasize that strongly enough, so I’ll stop trying. 

I think that I’m going to stop here for now. I’ll circle back next week and talk about Food and Voice, along with some of the issues that we face as we try to educate some of these girls. Until next week, thanks for being here,. Have an amazing week.