Why does a girl's education matter ?

According to major research studies, educated girls are 50% more likely to immunize their children in the future. With an extra year of education, a girl can earn up to 20% more as an adult. A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to survive past the age of 5. ( Teachers without Borders )

I don't think it is really any surprise that I am passionate about the value of a girl's education .When my mother was 27 years old she was widowed just before Christmas when my father died from Brucellosis at the age of 31 . He had come home from work, tired after a fairly ordinary day as a country vet . I was the middle of her three daughters and we were all aged under 5 . Her parents and only sister were living in Australia and at that point in her life they felt very far away .

My mother was an educated woman . She was able to teach high school students in various full-time positions throughout our childhood and still spend evenings at home with her three girls. It was only once we were in bed that she usually did her marking and preparation for the following day . She read to us most evenings and dinner times were always around the table with the television off as our words tripped over each others . Although the years were far from easy for my mother , she was able to move us back to Australia , buy a lovely family home in a safe suburb and bring us up until we were also three young women attending university and living independent lives.

I know these memories could have been very different however if she had not been gifted with the combined power of her education and a home and country which supported a woman to be able to make such choices . Her education was so much more than the financial security it offered . It was intrinsic to the home culture she created, the attitudes to men and women being equally capable that she instilled . It shaped so much of what each of our lives have become as adults .

I am aware that her ability to offer this also came from her own upbringing . Her parents were both university lecturers and published writers . They had also both been brought up with the value of a girl's education being an accepted part of their everyday life . My grandmother was one of five girls whose parents believed girls were strong and should have careers and my grandfather had four sisters who also all went to university . This belief in their independence was during a period when such attitudes were not so common . For both generations the parents unfailingly supported their daughters financially and emotionally to get a good education . Again they were able to do this because the country they lived in was comparatively safe, wealthy and supportive .

I often think about the combined influence a family cycle and the wider environment we live in has when it comes to education and in turn the paths people , namely women in this context, take in their lives . I believe both have such an enormous impact on whether girls believe they are capable of doing well at school , whether education matters to them or not at some stage in their lives , if they have the safe and supportive spaces and resources to nurture it .

What if my mother had grown up in a family where a girl's education did not matter ? What if she had grown up in a country where a girls education was not valued ? What if in instead of coming home to our mother's home cooked meals and wonderful stories in the evening , our home had disappeared . What if she had disappeared too ?