Education is the most effective tool for solving the world’s greatest challenges
Our Work - DRAFT
If all women completed secondary education, child deaths would be cut in half, saving three million lives.
Worldwide access to primary and girls’ education could result in a 70 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050.13 Deaths caused by natural disasters and extreme temperature events could be 60% lower by 2050 if 70% of women were able to achieve a lower-secondary-school education.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the risk of conflict in countries with higher education equality is less than half that of areas with lower equality in education.
Over 40 years, income per capita is 23% higher in a country with more equal education.
Room to Read addresses both access to education and quality of education, meeting children’s learning needs both in and out of the classroom
How We Do It
Our Literacy Portfolio supports children in developing literacy skills with a love of reading, and our Gender Equality Portfolio supports adolescents, particularly girls, in developing life skills that promote gender equality. We deliver and scale our programming directly and with partners, operating within our core competencies: curriculum and content; educator training and coaching; delivery structures; and research and insights. To accelerate learning outcomes for more children, more quickly, we collaborate with government education systems and non-formal learning systems, as well as multimedia and evidence management systems to scale our programming.
Developing life skills that promote gender equality
Room to Read’s Gender Equality Portfolio supports all adolescents, particularly girls, to develop life skills that promote gender equality. Within our Girls' Education Program, we help girls develop their power as positive change agents through four main components:
Room to Read recognizes the role that boys and men play in promoting a more gender equitable world. Promoting gender equal relations and attitudes among boys can profoundly improve their life outcomes as well as the lives of their future partners and children. We are deepening our commitment to gender equality by offering life skills programming for boys that provides a safe space for them to question harmful gender norms and practice gender equal behaviors.
Room to Read is poised to implement our gender equality programming at scale as we integrate our approach and life skills curriculum in public schools and long-term community programming and work alongside ministries of education in several countries to adapt and integrate key parts of our life skills curriculum at the systems level.
We’ve gone further to develop the delivery of our life skills curriculum through a variety of multimedia channels to reach every adolescent girl in the world with the tools she needs to create change. Our multimedia storytelling initiative, She Creates Change, seeks to support all adolescent girls in the world with the content that equips and inspires them to create positive change in their lives – delivering curriculum packages that align with stories presented through books, audio stories and film.
Severe Learning Crisis
The world is experiencing its most severe global learning crisis. The current generation of children are experiencing the largest loss of learning in recorded history, and learning poverty has increased by a third in low-and middle-income countries.
- Only 1 in 6 countries are on track to meet Sustainable Development Goal 4 and achieve universal access to quality education by 2030.
- Progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 5 has been slow, with only 15% of indicators on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.
- Even if governments meet their national education targets, there will still be an estimated 84 million children and young people out of school by 2030.
