A year after Taliban militants tried to kill her, Malala Yousafzai met President Barack Obama, the first lady and their daughter Malia at the White House.
The young Pakistani education activist was 15 when gunmen boarded her school bus, asked which girl was Malala, and opened fire. Somehow, she survived the bullet that drove bone fragments into her brain, and not long after that she was again speaking out in defense of girls’ right to get an education.
“All it takes is 30 seconds in a room with this young woman to realize what a blessing she is to our world,” Michelle Obama said last year.
Malala’s ordeal and triumph became one of the inspirations for Michelle Obama’s latest — and last — White House crusade: Getting an estimated 62 million girls around the world into classrooms — girls who are denied an education for myriad reasons, from poverty and child labor to militancy and forced marriage.
And while she and the rest of the Obama family will leave the White House in January 2017, the first lady has made it clear that she will not abandon the Let Girls Learn initiative, launched last March, once her husband’s term ends.
In the last year, the Chicago-born first lady has promoted the cause by harnessing the star power of celebrity friends — from Beyonce to Bono — and using social media as well as her contacts in the magazine world and corporate sector.
It’s a formula she’s used on other initiatives, from fighting childhood obesity to supporting military families.
As a result, Barneys, the high-end boutique, trumpeted girls’ education in window displays last year. L.L. Bean sold backpacks to raise awareness. A jewelry company, Alex and Ani, plans to donate to the cause a portion of proceeds from a new Let Girls Learn-inspired bangle bracelet.
Tina Tchen, a Chicago lawyer and Michelle Obama’s top aide, called girls’ lack of access to education a “global problem with enormous dimensions across the world,” but one which, until recently, had not resonated with mainstream America.
Michelle Obama’s meeting with Malala was “one spark” for the initiative, Tchen said. Another was the 2014 kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram.
Tchen said the first lady wanted to avoid duplicating work being done in other arenas to improve girls’ access to education and “use the power of the platform that we have here — as Mrs. Obama often calls it, that ‘bright shiny light that follows her around.’
The 62 million figure is an estimate by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and understates the problem, Tchen said. The figure approximates the number of girls kept out of primary and lower-secondary grades, not those in the upper ranks of high school.
Broadly speaking, girls’ school attendance is on par with boys in primary grades but lags when they hit adolescence, experts say. The biggest trouble spots tend to be in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia.
Let Girls Learn marshals the resources of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a number of other federal entities to help more girls overseas get access to books, teachers, classrooms and libraries. The U.S. contributed a half billion dollars in the first year, Tchen said.
The program’s other component is a diplomatic effort to persuade other nations to contribute to the cause. Tchen said nearly $600 million in foreign commitments have been made since the launch.
On behalf of Let Girls Learn, Michelle Obama has traveled to the U.K., Japan, Qatar and Cambodia, where, according to Tchen, she was moved by a Cambodian girl who described rising at 4 a.m., doing her chores and then bicycling in the dark for an hour to get to school.
Michelle Obama understands firsthand the need for an initiative like Let Girls Learn. The first lady often has said that as a young black girl growing up on the South Side, she wasn’t encouraged to aim for Princeton and Harvard, where she eventually earned degrees. She left law school with huge student loans.
And after quitting a high-paying job in corporate law, her work running Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that trained young people for positions in nonprofits, taught her that “real meaningful change in communities doesn’t happen from the top down, it happens from the ground up,” she said in Cambodia last March, when meeting Peace Corps volunteers who are partners of Let Girls Learn.
The Peace Corps, which operates in 62 countries, has teamed up with Let Girls Learn in 17 of those countries. Volunteers get trained to engage local leaders in producing homegrown solutions to get girls in school — measures ranging from installing latrines to curbing sexual violence, said Carrie Hessler-Radelet, the Peace Corps director.
Classrooms without toilets can make school a no-go zone for girls, especially when they are menstruating, Hessler-Radelet said. Worse, some girls face sexual attacks on their way to school or at school, she said.
The first lady’s celebrity friends, including Lena Dunham and Julianne Moore, have helped by taking part in public service announcements, or tweeting with the hashtag, #62MillionGirls. “Every time we ask somebody, they want to jump in,” Tchen said.
In speeches, Michelle Obama says research on girls’ education shows that educated girls marry later, see lower rates of infant mortality, are less apt to contract HIV/AIDS and are more likely to immunize their children. They also earn higher salaries — 15 to 25 percent for each additional year of secondary school.
Rebecca Winthrop, an education expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and co-author of “What Works in Girls’ Education,” said that despite recent gains made in improving girls’ access to education, difficult work remains.
Many girls face a host of disadvantages that combine to impede education — poverty, discriminatory cultural norms, and in some places, militancy, Winthrop said.
In her book, Winthrop wrote that girls still “face attacks — from kidnapping to rape to dismemberment to murder — simply because they are seeking an education.”
Tchen added that, in her personal view, girls are being singled out because “if you want to cause instability in the region, you keep your girls uneducated.”
The first lady isn’t the only high-profile figure deeply involved in efforts to improve girls’ access to education. Also committed to the cause are actress Angelina Jolie and Julia Gillard, Australia’s former prime minister. But Michelle Obama, said Gillard in an email, “has brought profile and passion to the cause … She has spoken frankly and fearlessly about the poverty and cultural constraints that hold girls back.
Gillard added, “The first lady’s own life story proves the power of education.”
Twitter @KatherineSkiba
