How Education Can Reduce Global Poverty and Hunger

The large strides made by UNICEF in ensuring the provision of quality basic education
for children has been lauded for all the right reasons and in the 2000 Education for

All (EFA) program as well as other like-minded initiatives were also launched to
support UNICEF’s push for education in both urban and rural areas. This raises a few

questions: why is educating the world so important to UNICEF? And what have these
initiatives achieved globally? These among other questions are what this essay

intends to answer in the coming paragraphs.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) launched by the UNICEF in 2000 and its

follow up program the Sustainable Development Goals created in 2015 have been
successful in increasing the economic situation of both underdeveloped and

developing nations, enlightening the world on communicable diseases as well as

pushing an agenda for worldwide peace. But here, emphasis will be placed on how

educating the world’s populace has reduced global poverty and how aggressively
pursuing the global education agenda will continue to reduce hunger internationally.

The education of an entire population has been known to lead to economic growth
which is viewed as a by-product of global education. Studies on the effect of

education has shown that each extra year an individual spends schooling directly
increases his or her ability to earn by 10% later on in life. A population’s increased

ability to earn then creates a trickle-down effect as adults now posses the ability to
adequately take care of their families as well as send their children to school.

The overall economic growth in turn reduces the percentage of people living in
poverty as more and more adults begin to have the financial capacity to cater for

their immediate family. Also important is the fact that a country with 40% of its adult
population having achieved some form of education, experiences continuous

economic growth thereby putting it on the right track to eliminate extreme poverty in
the EU by 2020 or in Africa by 2063 according to UNICEF’s initiatives.
Educating the world is an admirable goal but the disparity between the number of
girls educated compared to boys has been lopsided for decades in favour of boys.

This disparity has prompted UNICEF to place special emphasis on educating

women/girls and the corresponding results have been encouraging. Statistics show

that educating the women has led to a 22% increase in crop yield in Kenya. This goes
to show that applying these educative initiatives in gender-repressive communities

globally, will accelerate the goal of ending poverty and world hunger more quickly.

Therefore pursuing a global education agenda is an admirable goal which everyone

should be involved with in their own capacity. It is encouraged that we write essays
supporting educational initiatives on a global scale, discuss them on social media

networks or be a part of the SDG which took effect in 2015.