VirtuArte.com

I recently received an e-mail from a friend with the title: You've been sent a link to start The Girl Effect. I wondered what The Girl Effect was. I thought maybe it was a new social network, a website for women entrepreneurs or a website about new trends that have been started by women. I opened the e-mail and found the following:

Girl Effect, n. The powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society.

We're starting a revolution to end poverty. And it starts with girls in the developing world.

Visit http://www.girleffect.org.

So I clicked on the link, arrived at The Girl Effect website and watched a video about the impact on the developing world and girls themselves, if they ar given the opportunity to get an education and earn an income. Did you know?

• Educated girls grow into educated women, who -- research shows -- have healthier babies and are more likely to educate their children.
• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.
• An extra year of primary school boosts girls' eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent.
• When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90% of it into their families, as compared to only 30% to 40% for a man.

Primary Education Focus

Now a considerable amount of focus has been placed on providing universal primary education by the international development community, particularly through the Millennium Development Goals -- eight specific goals agreed upon in 2000 by all the world's countries and the leading development institutions to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. At the end of September, a coalition of governments, charities and UN Agencies pledged US$4.5 billion in an effort to get all the world's children in school by 2015. This focus is great for the girls who are still of the age to go to primary school, but what about those women who are older, did not have the opportunity to get an education and need to earn an income.

Who Are These Women?

Some of these women are still young; many have gotten married before the age of 18. Others are widowed and have no other source of income. These women mainly participate in the informal sector, have learned more traditional skills that are viewed to be less lucrative and are the least paid. The employment opportunities for these women can also be impacted by cultural limitations to female mobility and clearly defined gender roles. These women are also responsible for their households and have children or grandchildren to take care of.

Helping "Older" Women

There are initiatives taking place to help this group of women. One of these initiatives, in Northern Ghana, is the Ideal Woman Shea Butter Producers and Pickers Association backed by the United Nations Development Programme and the Japanese government. This initiative is helping rural women form cooperatives and set up training centers where they can be trained to produce high quality shea butter and other related products. This has lead to a higher quality of shea butter being sold on the international market by the cooperatives and the women receiving a profit of US$10 per hundred kilos versus the US$2 they were getting. As a result these women are able to build their own houses, send their children to school, provide better nutrition to their familes and even have dental work done. All things once thought to be impossible by these women.

This is the group of women I want to help through VirtuArte. As I have said before, in some places these traditional skills have been developed to create products that are worthy of a place in the marketplace of beautiful objects. I have already introduced you to some individuals I have met, Pauline Lewis of oovoo, Ellen Dorsch of Creative Women and Carol Cassidy of Lao Textiles, who are working with women, paying a fair wage, while enhancing the traditional skills -- textile weaving, embroidery, basket weaving -- to produce beautiful products that are being sold in international markets. There are other people and products I plan to introduce you to in the future.

Giving adolescent girls a chance to par take in society is important for the future growth of developing countries. However, today it is important to give the older girls and women a chance to be active participants in society so they can be role models for their own children and future generations.