"As any child can tell you, change does not begin with the world as it is, but the world as it could be."
Rt Hon Bridget Phillipson, Phil Baty, Honorable Ministers, Dignitaries and Guests,
Thank you for inviting me to address this conference. It is an honor to be with you today.
I have been an education activist for seventeen years and I’ve learned a lot, some of it from people in this room.
From education ministers and officials, I’ve learned what happens when budgets are cut — the schools that aren’t built, the teachers not hired, the children left behind. In these conversations, I’ve also discovered how slow change can be — and that is often the most frustrating part of my work. A policy change or funding agreement delayed by a year is a year of school that a child will never get back, a year of opportunity that cannot be recovered. The gap between intention and action is where futures are lost.
From presidents, prime ministers and their governments, I have learned about priorities — how education becomes a secondary concern in the face of war, disaster or debt. When the world is in crisis, we see who is protected and who is pushed aside.
Activists have taught me the importance of civil society. Youth advocates, parents, teachers and local organizations are the first to notice where systems are failing — and the frontline for developing solutions.
But I have learned the most from girls — specifically from the 122 million girls who are out of school today. They understand the problems preventing them from accessing education. Sometimes the obstacles are easy to see — like the barbed wire cutting off the path to school for a group of Palestinian children in the West Bank. When I spoke to girls from this school earlier this month, their biggest concern was their upcoming exams. How can they continue their education if they can’t even reach their classroom?
Girls understand the problems — but they also have solutions. In Nigeria, where one in three girls is married before her 18th birthday, young women told me that we needed to fight early marriage. But, at the same time, they wanted government policies that allowed married and pregnant girls to go back to the classroom — a pathway to continue their education without stigma or shame.
From Iraq to Brazil, I’ve met girls with incredible determination and boundless optimism. In refugee camps, they talk about becoming architects. In India, they walk miles to attend open-air schools without blackboards or books. In Palestine, seven year-old girls organize protests for their right to education.
Nowhere is their determination more courageous and vital than in Afghanistan, where girls are banned from school past sixth grade under the Taliban’s brutal regime of gender apartheid. Across the country today, they are listening to lessons on the radio, discretely passing cassette tapes and books to each other and trying to keep studying in secret. I recently spoke with a teenager there who told me, “If all I can do is go to my room, close the door and read a book, it feels like an act of rebellion against the Taliban.”
In everything I do, I aim to match their determination. My mother grew up in a village that had never had a secondary school for girls. When I decided to build one, people were quick to tell me why it couldn’t be done. They said construction was impossible in such a remote area. That qualified teachers wouldn’t want to work there. That local social norms meant fathers wouldn’t allow their daughters to attend school even if there was one.
I didn’t let that stop me — and today the Shangla Girls School has 1,050 students. The high school girls have scored some of the top marks in the province on their standardized exams.
Last week, I received a letter from a Shangla student named Amra and I’d like to share part of it to you:
“At seven years old, I was very sick. My father was poor and the hospital bills were more than he could afford. Finally, the doctor told me ‘If you want to save your life, one leg will have to be sacrificed.’
At that time, I was young, and I had no sense of anything. But, as I grew, so did the problems. There were mountains standing between me and the school. The distances were long and my steps were small.
Our neighbors said, ‘Why do you need to go to school? How will you even get there?’ But my mother said: ‘Education will be your new leg, Amra.’
Today I am a one-legged girl. But one day I will become Shangla's first woman prosthetic leg specialist. The world took one leg from me — I will return a thousand legs to the world.”
122 million girls like Amra are out of school today. That number is equivalent to the entire population of Egypt or Japan. Maybe 122 million feels less staggering when you know that it’s made up of girls around the world. Maybe they are easier to write-off in rural communities and conflict zones. But imagine how different life would be in Nigeria or Pakistan if every girl could reach her full potential, if she could contribute to her community with all her ideas and energy, live a more fulfilled life and choose her own future.
This is the world that girls dream about and strive for every day — it is the hope that keeps a disabled girl crossing mountains to go to school in my mother’s village and Afghan girls risking their lives to continue learning. It’s a world we have promised — and failed to deliver — for far too long.
Sometimes at conferences like these, we get caught up in the practicalities of policy-making — the work that each of us does every day, that often takes years, even decades, to come to fruition. It is easy to lose our ability to imagine, our capacity for the wonder of building a better world.
I would argue that in order to maintain a sense of urgency, we must have imagination as well. As any child can tell you, change does not begin with the world as it is, but the world as it could be. While you are going about your work and discussions this week, I ask you to imagine the future as girls do — to hold a picture of it so clearly that you cannot look away. When you leave this room, I hope you are even more determined to close the gap between that vision and our current reality. Every girl belongs in school — not someday, not in another 20 years, but now.
Thank you.
