10 Weeks – 10 Girls

When you start searching for stories about girls, you get a mix like this:
stories about victimization, sexualization, and the exceptional girls who fight back.

There’s good reason for the headlines, because the numbers are just as troubling:

•  1 in 5 girls is said to be married before the age of 18;
• an estimated 15 million girls around the world between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced forced sex;
• an estimated 130 million girls between the ages of 6 and 17 are out of school.

But we wanted to know what life looks like for girls, BEYOND the headlines.

What do teenage girls dream about in a refugee camp?

What does a 17-year-old worry about in Manila and in the Midwest?

We wanted to hear girls’ stories from around the world in their own voices.

We asked teenage girls in 10 different countries to share diary entries with us.

The experience of writing in a diary is a near-universal one — it’s where teenage girls for centuries and across continents have begun to make sense of the world around them and their place in it.

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Week ONE:  Afghanistan

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Girls’ access to education in Afghanistan has been limited for decades.

During the Taliban’s rule in the country in the late 1990s, girls were not allowed to attend school.

Now, 17 years after the end of the Taliban’s rule, more than half of all girls in Afghanistan remain out of school.

In fact, the country is ranked as one of the worst in the world for girls’ access to education.

Cultural gender norms, child marriage, poverty and a lack of schools are some of the reasons that contribute to lack of access to girls’ education in the country.

Read Halima and Khan Bibi’s DIARY ENTRIES to learn more about what that means to teenage girls in Afghanistan today! 

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4GGL thanks Lily Lines for this series!