International Women’s Day, With Ann Norris

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is International Women's Day.

With me to discuss International Women's Day, and particularly the challenges facing adolescent girls around the world, is Ann Norris. Ann is a senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council. She has held several posts in the U.S. government. She has been a principal deputy assistant aecretary of atate for legislative affairs, a senior advisor at the State Department, and counselor to the ambassador-at-large for Global Women's Issues, and Senior Foreign Policy and Defense Advisor to Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Ann wrote the Council report, "Renewing the Global Architecture for Gender Equality" in 2022.

Ann, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

NORRIS:
Thank you very much for having me today.

LINDSAY:
Now, Friday is International Women's Day, and when I asked you to come on The President's Inbox, you immediately said we should talk about the challenges that adolescent girls around the world face. Why?

NORRIS:
I think there's been this tremendous focus on gender equality, and there's been a lot of work done on younger girls, and there's been a lot of work done on women, but there's this period in a girl's life, roughly from the ages of ten to nineteen, when the trajectory of their life can really go one way or the other. And stepping in at that point to make sure that girls are able to continue their education, to be free from violence, to have opportunity, and to feel like they're valued members of their community can really have a tremendous impact. And too often, that demographic just gets kind of lost, and once they're kind of lost from protections and services, their lives, in many ways, end up not being where we want them to go.

LINDSAY:
So we're talking about a fairly substantial demographic, aren't we? And I've seen numbers approaching six hundred million adolescent girls worldwide, five hundred million in so-called low and middle income countries. Is that roughly right?

NORRIS:
Yes. That figure is roughly right, and most of them are just missing opportunities that girls in more developed countries have and could really, again, change the trajectory of their lives with services and a particular focus on this demographic.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So let's talk about the challenges that adolescent girls face, particularly in low and middle income countries. You've alluded to a couple already, one being violence against them, but could you just sort of lay out for us what the various challenges are that policy makers are seeking to address?

NORRIS:
There seems to be, and I heard this during my time in government, this sense that getting girls some level of schooling is enough, that we get them into basic education, which is elementary school, if we're thinking about it this way, and that somehow, doing that sets them up in a way that they'll be able to kind of make it through. And the reality is, that's just not true. If you think about it, a sixth grade education doesn't really equip you for the current global economy to do math, read, write, converse, set up bank accounts. So we're really stunting these girls before they have a chance to build their future.

And what happens? Early marriage, in a lot of cases. They don't have agency in their communities. Oftentimes, they're end up in a situation where they end up having children very, very early. A girl, for example, is five times more likely to die in childbirth if she has a kid before the age of fifteen. They're more likely to-

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about that, Ann. How widespread is child marriage around the globe? Is it a small problem in a few countries? Is it a broader problem worldwide?

NORRIS:
It's a big problem worldwide. There are hundreds of millions of girls who have been married early. UNICEF expects that an additional hundred million will be married by the end of the decade without significant intervention. There are girls who are being married here in the United States. Only ten states in the United States ban child marriage under the age of eighteen without exception. In a lot of cases, you can go to courts and have parental involvement and sign off and get girls married. It's almost always younger girls married to older men. And so it's very prevalent. And the international community has spoken, the SDG say that we need to ban child marriage in its entirety by 2030, and we're just not there yet. And the United States, frankly, isn't setting a very good example in that space.

LINDSAY:
So, Ann, when you say SDG, that's referring to Sustainable Development Goal?

NORRIS:
Yes. I'm referring to the Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality.

LINDSAY:
And that came out of the United Nations?

NORRIS:
Yes. It came out of the United Nations. It's a commitment that most countries in the world have made to meet a series of targets by 2030. And one of those, in its entirety, is focused on empowering women and girls achieving gender equality. And one of the targets within that goal is to end child marriage, full stop, by 2030. It's a human rights abuse, and it's far too widespread, and it has really profound and devastating consequences for the girls who endure it constantly around the world.

LINDSAY:
So as we look at the challenges facing adolescent girls around the world, we've mentioned violence, lack of education or incomplete education, early or child marriage. Any other issues that are a particular concern?

NORRIS:
I mean, the list is really endless. The World Bank has done a tremendous amount of work on this. They found that, in too many countries around the world, girls don't even have legal status. Their births don't get registered. They kind of live statelessly within their own countries, kind of on the margins. And girls who receive an education are more likely to have birth registration. They're more likely to be able to exert decision making in their families, to have some type of control and agency over their lives.

You step back and kind of think about it, if somebody has a sixth grade education, if that, and we haven't even gotten to the quality of the education they're receiving, which is pretty poor. But you have just this entire demographic who is going around not being able to advocate for themselves, to have any sort of rights whatsoever, and the abuses that they're subjected to are just endless. Exploitation by teachers, by people in their communities, and just really giving them tools and education to have a fighting chance within these systems is something that's really critical for the international community to step in and focus on at this point.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand, Ann, as you develop policies designed to attack, address these various aspects of the problem. What's the payoff that results from success? Do we have any metrics that help us think about what would happen if we succeeded in reducing violence, improving education, ending child marriage?

NORRIS:
Yeah. I mean, again, the list goes on and on. Girls who have children later have children who are five times less likely to die before the age of five. The children are healthier. There's less growth stunting. Individual lifetime earnings are really significant for these girls.

There's been this understanding that having just a primary education is almost just as bad in many cases as having no education at all. But if you can get a girl through twelve years of school, her lifetime earnings will double. If she has the chance of going on to college, we're talking about a tripling of lifetime earning potential, and this has a real dollar figure. There's an estimates that economies could grow by up to $30 trillion U.S. dollars.

LINDSAY:
Trillion with a T, correct?

NORRIS:
Trillion with a T, yes. Not billion, trillion. I mean, this is a really huge demographic whose power we're just failing to harness. And the interventions are tough, but they're clear, and we just need the political will and motivation to really step in and say, if we want to solve the problems of the future, this is the future and we have to start focusing on these girls. What's happening to them is not okay. And it's not only hurting them, it's hurting their communities, it's hurting their countries, and it's impacting our ability to address the issues. We as an international community want to solve poverty. I mean, it even gets into climate.

LINDSAY:
How so?

NORRIS:
Studies have shown that girls who are more educated, women who are more educated, are more likely to use climate adaptation skills. Again, when they're more empowered in their communities through education, they form groups and focus on tools and mitigation. They're able to better protect their children.

And this is a bit of a sensitive topic, but the reality is that, girls who are able to complete twelve years of education often have fewer children over the course of their lifetime. And it's not that they should have fewer children, just have fewer children, but they're able to have more agency over the spacing of their children, when to have their children. So you're talking about just magnitudes of children who are being born to children. I mean, that's the reality. When you have a thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-old start having children, she's going to have five, six, seven children, if not more, over her lifetime. If you're able to push that back a little bit, say, into their twenties, I mean, the reality is, fewer children, a choice about having those children, when they have those children, and then healthier children.

So less impact on communities down the road if we really step in and use this tool to stop explosive population growth. I think, frankly, a lot of women aren't asking for, a lot of them don't have a choice, about whether or not to start having these children really young.

LINDSAY:
So, Ann, as you look at these various challenges, do we have evidence that we have policies or programs that are effective in addressing them?

NORRIS:
So that's the piece about education that's so key. When I started working on this issue, when I was at the State Department, we'd kind of look at all of these things, the issues: violence, child marriage, independently. And then we realized, talking through experts who have spent a tremendous amount of time focusing on this, that the intervention is education, and it's particularly adolescent education. It's keeping girls in school through high school, at least middle school, if not high school. If they are in school, they're often not getting married. They're less likely to endure violence. They're less likely to be exploited.

I remember speaking to a girl, when I was at a UN conference a number of years ago, and she was from Sub-Saharan Africa, and she said, "Well, I need $200 to be able to pay my school fees every year." She said, "Or my alternative is selling moonshine on the streets." And it was just a gut punch to think that there was $200 standing between a life of her going around selling alcohol on the streets in her community, or being in a classroom. And it doesn't mean the classrooms are perfect. Their teachers are not always qualified. They can be exploited in school, and that's a real challenge. But the intervention is getting girls in a classroom and trying to build a safe space where they start getting the tools they need to have agency over their lives going forward.

LINDSAY:
So that, Ann, raises, at least to me, the question of who should be the ones tackling this problem. I mean, as you talk about the benefits that come from educating young women so that they have the tools to be more productive, successful parts of their society. Why isn't this something that states or governments themselves take on, given the obvious potential payoff for those countries?

NORRIS:
There's a few reasons. One is that, it's hard. When you are dealing with a four-year-old or a five or six-year-old, you send them to kindergarten, first grade, you don't have to think about all of the other things probably that they should be doing. But in a lot of these places, families are really poor, and they could use an extra hand at home to either take care of family members, work on farms. And there isn't always an understanding of the value of education, because maybe there aren't opportunities in that community for that girl. So you have to do a lot of work, with families, with communities, to explain the utility.

It's expensive for a lot of families. There's studies that show that in a number of countries, school fees for secondary school could take up half a family's income. So you have to say, I mean, you have to, not only have the money, but be willing to take it away from other things. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done with communities to convince them to convince governments of the utility of educating girls.

The evidence is there. It's not one of these kind of obscure, "I don't get what the point of this is." The evidence is there. It's just kind of shifting resources, focusing and really getting down and doing the hard work of changing cultural norms, putting money where our mouth is on this, and getting these girls in the classroom.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me sort of pull on this thread here, of cultural norms that you mentioned, Ann. That sounds like that could make these efforts politically freighted very quickly, as countries, societies, communities believe that someone from outside is trying to change their way of life, and cultures tend to resist change being pushed from outside. How does that play out in practice?

NORRIS:
That's a really good point, because the reality is, I think too often we've tried to come in from the outside and say, "You should do this," instead of trying to empower groups and communities working on the ground. Very little money actually ends up going...International education money goes to NGOs, kind of local groups who know and understand the challenges and the particular nuances of their community. But those are the programs that really work.

To share one example, I don't know if you've had the privilege of crossing paths with her, but there's this wonderful woman named Kakenya Ntaiya who was going to be subjected to early marriage. She's from the Maasai community in Kenya, and she just decided that this wasn't the life that she wanted. And she, long story short, was able to kind of negotiate with her father and put off being married early and she ended up starting a school for girls.

And this is one of the most conservative communities, I think, that you can find in terms of girls' education. And she just was tenacious about it. She talked to tribal leaders. She set up a school, it's called Kakenya's Dream. And in exchange for parents agreeing not to marry their girls off earlier, have them undergo female genital mutilation, which was a big issue for her that we can get into if you want, but she built a boarding school. And the girls, the community has allowed the girls to go to this school, and a lot of them have gone all the way through and they're now at colleges around the world and they're coming back to their communities. But she was the one, because she was the face to say, "This is me. I understand you. I understand what your concerns are, and let me help alleviate them and build a safe space for your girls and give me a shot." 

And it's been tremendously impactful. President Obama met with one of their students in Africa. This is what we need to be doing, you really hit the nail on the head, is empowering local communities and giving them the tools and the resources to start doing this kind of work, and not trying to come in from the top down and say, "We've got it all figured out," because we don't, and there's plenty of profound education challenges in the United States with primary, secondary education here. We have a lot of kids who aren't learning and succeeding either.

LINDSAY:
So is the example that you point to something that's replicable? Because I wonder sometimes how much of this depends upon having incredibly impassioned, determined people who are able to navigate their own communities or societies to affect change. But even when they do, it's difficult because it is changing or challenging cultural norms.

NORRIS:
I think, from experience, when I was in government, I worked on an initiative that President Obama and the first lady had put together called Let Girls Learn. And for various reasons, it never really got off the ground in the way that we had hoped to. But there was a request for ideas sent out to communities where there was an intent to spend money. I mean, it was kind of a real different way of doing things. Instead of coming in from the U.S. government through USAID saying, "This is the program we're going to run here," we sent this solicitation out and said, "Send us your ideas, and let us know what you want us to fund in your communities." And we were focusing on Malawi at that point.

We got hundreds of ideas. I mean, it was bikes. I mean, that's one thing. Girls can't make it...In a lot of places, the school isn't right down the road because they're in rural communities. It's-

LINDSAY:
And there's no local bus service. There's no yellow bus that will pick you up and take you home.

NORRIS:
No. There's no bus. These girls are walking. They're scrapping together transportation. They're vulnerable. I mean, that's another whole reason. Families are like, "You want me to let her travel to school? I mean, for what end? What is she going to get at the end?" So building safe transportation systems. People really thought creatively about how to build an infrastructure.

And it doesn't mean that everything was going to work, but the consequences of not trying are really profound. And it's, again, not just because it's awful for these girls. Changing their lives and working on these interventions and getting down and doing the hard work really will change the trajectory of these communities, and families, and their future children and their future children's families. 

So potential benefits are pretty profound for doing this work, which as you point out, it's very hard, and it's culturally sensitive, and it's not as easy as just building a school and saying, "Everybody come." But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing this. And I don't know how long, not doing it...We have the luxury of sticking with if we want to change, if we want to start really solving some of these problems.

LINDSAY:
Ann, I'm glad you raised the example of Let Girls Learn, because it points to the bigger challenge of what priority these efforts should be within U.S. Foreign Policy writ large. I know you've dealt with this, obviously, when you're in the State Department. You have this portfolio. You're championing it, but the people who are dealing with Taiwan or Ukraine or arms control, the list goes on, are all arguing that their issue should be a priority for attention, for energy, for resources. So why should the United States make this a priority?

NORRIS:
That's a great question. I'm so glad that you asked it. So the reality is, that the United States has and continues to spend, under different administrations, a significant amount of money on education funding abroad. But the majority of that funding, the overwhelming majority, goes to basic education, early childhood education. That's what the U.S. does. The government will kind of defend it and say, "This is what we do." And they do some tertiary education, and to give the USG credit, they do some education for older girls in conflict zones.

But as I said before, if you only give a child a fourth, fifth, sixth grade education, it's not enough. And there's also the reality that they lose their literacy, which, yeah, if you're not doing math and you're not being exposed to written material, and you're not reading because you're working and doing household chores or raising six children, I mean, the reality is, by the time you're fifteen, eighteen, twenty, you probably don't have many of those skills left. I think a lot of us can probably think of our high school language experiences. You think you're really onto something and then you realize you remember very little of it down the road. So I think we're failing to capitalize on this tremendous investment by saying, "Well, that's enough. You got fourth, fifth, sixth grade, now you're kind of on your own." I never understood why there wasn't more of a desire to kind of say, "We've done this investment and now we're going to see if we can carry this through."

And it doesn't even need to be, at first, I think on a massive scale. I think, we just need to start figuring out models that work and sending a signal from the United States that this is a demographic that is important to us. I think that that's kind of the bigger piece too. It's, well, if we are not there and then we tell other people they should be there, but we are not putting money where our mouth is, it kind of just cuts the knees off of the whole initiative. And there are a lot of people doing very, very hard work. But it's not enough, and the funding shortfalls are in the tens of billions of dollars. And it's just going to take a lot of political will. And it would be wonderful if the United States was helping to lead that and really pushing the message that this demographic is key to solving the challenges of our time.

LINDSAY:
I'm curious, Ann, we're talking about these programs, the one the U.S. government has been funding. What level of commitment are we talking? Are we talking hundreds of billions of dollars, billions of dollars, something less than that?

NORRIS:
It was around $600-$700 million annually that the U.S. government spent on basic education, so it's a huge donor. It's one of the leading donors to global education efforts. Germany's up there. There's a handful of countries that really spend money in this space. But there's just this understanding that the U.S. does the early stuff and that's what we've always done. And when I was in government, one of the pushbacks would kind of be, "Well, we haven't figured out early education. The quality of the education isn't that great, so why are we going to try to take something else on?" But again, it's kind of just cutting the knees off of our investment, and hoping that somebody else steps in, that communities step in. We spend money on tertiary education too, which I also found always kind of interesting, because then there's just this big gap in the middle.

LINDSAY:
So tertiary education is essentially universities. Okay.

NORRIS:
Yes. Universities. So it's like, "We'll help you in the beginning, and then good luck in the center, and then maybe we'll help you on the other end." And it's just this big blinking hole, and you have a hundred million girls of secondary school age just completely out of school at this point in time. One in three adolescent girls in the poorest countries has never stepped foot in a classroom.

LINDSAY:
That's a huge number.

NORRIS:
Staggering. And just having no tools and no agency. And it's great to talk about empowerment and leadership and participation in the workforce, but I think the reality is, if you can't read and write, or go and open a bank account or do some type of transaction without being exploited because you don't understand the numbers, is really asking a lot of people. And there are plenty of women and girls who are able to persevere and overcome this, but I think giving them the basic skills, and giving them a fighting chance kind of out there in the global community that we work and live in, is just critical and something the United States should be pushing for more of at this point.

LINDSAY:
Ann, I want to close by asking you how you respond to people you talk to who say, "Yes, the challenges that adolescent girls around the world face are significant, and it would be great if we could solve them, but we have problems here in the United States, and it would be much better if we spent money fixing our problems at home because that's who we have a fundamental responsibility to, and other countries should take care of their women and girls." What is your response to that line of argument?

NORRIS:
My response always, especially when talking to other governments or NGOs abroad, is, you're absolutely right. We have profound challenges here at home. There are plenty of girls who are out of school. Maternal mortality rates, particularly in Black communities, are appalling. We have child marriage issues. FGM, female genital mutilation, goes on here in the United States. So this is not coming of a perspective we have this all figured out. We have a lot of work to do here, and we all need to work together collectively to figure out the most effective interventions.

To the money piece, the money is separate. I mean, the reality is that foreign assistance and domestic programming is separate pots of money, and we can choose, through foreign assistance, what to prioritize. And this issue is just not getting lifted to the level it needs to get lifted to, given the list of positive outcomes. It's like, we want to see violence end. We want to see safer and more secure communities. We want to see economic empowerment. And the answer is kind of staring in our face. And it's not an easy answer. And it's not something that can be solved overnight. And it's something we need to work on here. But it's something the U.S. government just needs to be talking about more.

I mean, it's 2024. The Sustainable Development Goal deadline is 2030, and one of those goals is to have equal access to secondary education, and enrollment and completion for girls around the world. And boys, I should have mentioned. There's plenty of boys out of school too, that's a whole 'nother issue. But we've set this goal. We've said it's important, and now it's time to really redouble our efforts, so that we have some hope of getting somewhere near that. I don't think it's likely that this is going to be solved in the next six years, but it's not something that can continue to be kicked down the road in perpetuity because of the profound implications for girls and communities and the international community.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ann Norris, senior fellow for women and foreign policy here at the Council.

Ann, thank you very much for joining me.

NORRIS:
Thank you very much for having me.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Markus Zakaria was our recording engineer. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.