The third week of September is always a crazy time in New York, but it's a good crazy. It's full of possibilities. Between the Clinton Global Initiative, or CGI, and the UN General Assembly, there are literally dozens of opportunities to bring the girl effect to the forefront. I promised a few of the highlights and here they are.
Tuesday's CGI plenary session "Empowering Girls and Women" started with the world premiere of the video "The Girl Effect: The Clock is Ticking." It was an emotional moment for me and for the team led by Emily Brew that has worked so hard to create it. It tells the story of all that can go wrong in a girl's life and what happens when it all goes right. Most importantly, it reminds us that time is running out. We must act NOW. Check it out:
The session that followed -- the plenary on Girls and Women -- was an interesting one (you can see it on CGI's webcast), but I'm going to jump ahead to a breakout that took place later in the day. That's how excited I am to talk about it.
"Preparing Girls for the World" featured some of the world's leading girl champions: World Bank managing director Ngozi Okjonjo-Iweala, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, CARE CEO Helene Gayle and Intel Foundation president Shelly Esque.
The most powerful person on the stage? Tanvi Girotra, 19-year-old from India. She's the youngest person at CGI this year and has the distinction (finally!) of being the CGI's first speaker ever who is an adolescent girl herself.
Tanvi started a nonprofit, Becoming I -- The Foundation, that engages young people to work with girls in the sex trade in New Delhi to provide life skills training and alternative livelihoods. She explained why, among all of India's problems, she chose something so "radical" to address. "I can understand poverty. I can understand illiteracy... I don't understand being exploited to the extent that your body is your only asset and nothing else."
There's also a pretty amazing moment when Tanvi asks the whole room to stand and commit to doing something for girls tomorrow. This is good stuff, but please don't just take my word for it. Watch the session here.
Now on to moving real resources, my favorite topic. On Wednesday, I also spoke at an event hosted by the Secretary of State Clinton and Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin called "1,000 Days: Change a Life, Change the Future." The "1,000 Days" refers to the period of time between pregnancy and a child's second birthday. Put simply, from a nutritional standpoint, what happens to an adolescent mother will determine whether her children are healthy or not.
I was glad to have the chance to speak because so frequently adolescent girls are forgotten in any conversation that has to do with pregnancy and motherhood, yet pregnancy and childbirth are the number one cause of death for girls in poverty between the ages of 15 and 19.
If we really want to solve the issue of hunger we need to move two priorities right up to the top:
1. Once a girl reaches puberty, it is only a question of when -- not if -- she will become pregnant, so our first job is to delay that moment as long as possible.
2. Once she is pregnant, we need to reach her quickly, keep her healthy, and teach her how to keep her children healthy.
Forty percent of adolescent girls in poverty are anemic -- our best indicator that she is undernourished. In pregnancy that translates to increased risk of still or premature birth, low birth weight, prenatal and maternal mortality. Life as she knows it comes to an end, often literally (and always figuratively).
Of course, if we succeed on the first point, the second one becomes a whole lot easier. That requires reorienting investments to make girls themselves a priority. In other words, we get to the girls and everyone will be better off. That's a truth that holds up no matter what world issue we're trying to address.