Labour Day is around the corner and I’m chomping at the bit to get back to school.  I love brand new school supplies, fall outfits, seeing old friends again and sharing stories of summer!  At Because I am a Girl we talk a lot about how education makes a difference in the lives of girls, [...]

When we think about children in war, we most often imagine a young boy with a gun – a child soldier. We rarely think of girls in conflict, but they are equally if not more affected than boys. A few months ago we watched Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers as part of the HotDocs film festival [...]

“I was so excited about going abroad and earning money and helping my family.” Noraida, from the Philippines who, at the age of 13, left to work in the Arabian Gulf. Whenever I hear something like this quote, I try to think what I was doing at that age. What was I doing at age [...]

Right now I’m blogging from Europe, visiting family and working from little cafes while sipping cappuccinos. Sigh. Tough life. But Europe isn’t all berets and cobbled streets. The Roma population is Europe’s largest minority group, and its most vulnerable. We don’t often think about Europe as being a place with inequality and exclusion, but these [...]

1. Girls’ education leads to increased income, both for individuals and nations as a whole Providing girls one extra year of education beyond the average boosts eventual wages by 10 to 20 per cent.  A 100-country study by the World Bank shows that increasing the share of women with a secondary education by 1 per [...]

The opposite of the formal economy, the informal economy is defined as “is economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by a government, and is not included in that government’s Gross National Product (GNP).” One example is that if you sell your old skateboard to your friend, its part of the informal economy, but [...]

We talked before about the basics of this summer’s G8 to be held in Ontario. But what does this mean for girls? A lot. Stephen Harper has decided to focus on maternal health during this summer’s summit (say that 10 times fast!): Every year, nearly nine million children and 500,000 women die from causes we [...]

So, the G8 and G20 summits are coming to Canada and I thought I would give you a little heads up on what all the fuss is about. The terms G8 and G20 refer to two groups of countries. The Group of 8 (G8) includes France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, [...]

For me, Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends and Twitter helps me keep up to date on the latest news.  And sometimes people complain that I’m on my Blackberry too much.  But for girls around the world, it seems that information technology can offer girls and young women new pathways [...]

Warning: heavy topic. But one that needs to be talked about. Gendercide is defined as “gender-selective mass killing.” In many cases, gendercide involves the deliberate killing of women and girls. In an in-depth article in The Economist a couple of months ago, the subheading reads, “Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100 million girls have [...]