INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
could cost the world as much as $30 trillion in lost earnings and productivity annually, yet more than 130 million girls are out of school
globally, the World Bank said on Wednesday.Women who have completed secondary education are more likely to work and earn on average nearly
twice as much as those with no schooling, according to a report by the World Bank.About 132 million girls worldwide aged 6 to 17 do not
attend school, while fewer than two-thirds of those in low-income nations finish primary school, and only a third finish lower secondary
school, the World Bank said.If every girl in the world finished 12 years of quality education, lifetime earnings for women could increase by
$15 trillion to $30 trillion every year, according to the report.Other positive impacts of completing secondary school education for girls
include a reduction in child marriage, lower fertility rates in countries with high population growth, and reduced child mortality and
malnutrition, the World Bank said."We cannot keep letting gender inequality get in the way of global progress," Kristalina Georgieva, World
Bank chief executive, said in a statement.The benefits of educating girls are considerably higher at secondary school level in comparison to
primary education, said Quentin Wodon, World Bank lead economist and main report author."While we do need to insure that of course all girls
complete primary school, that is not enough," Wodon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.Women who have completed secondary education are at
lesser risk of suffering violence at the hands of their partners and have children who are less likely to be malnourished and themselves are
more likely to go to school, the report said."When 130 million girls are unable to become engineers or journalists or CEOs because education
is out of their reach, our world misses out on trillions of dollars," Malala Yousafzai, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a
statement."This report is more proof that we cannot afford to delay investing in girls," said Yousafzai, an education activist was shot in
the head at the age of 15 by a Taliban gunman in 2012.The report was published ahead of U.N
not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
