WFP calls for girls education

The head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has called on the international community to help send girls in developing countries to school, citing girls' education as an effective weapon to end global hunger and poverty. Catherine Bertini, the Executive Director of WFP, who issued the challenge ahead of International Women's Day on Thursday, said that closing the gap between boys' and girls' school enrolment should be the top priority for the international community in poor and developing countries. "In school, young girls not only learn to read and write, they also gain an understanding of the possibilities in life that education can create," Bertini said. "I know of one little girl in Benin who was returned to school because we gave her parents cooking oil the whole family could use. Over that one year in school, she got the idea that she wanted to train to be a nurse and work in a hospital. And this was a girl who had never known anything but doing manual labour for her family." WFP has been promoting girl's education through this "take-home rations" programme since 1991, when the first such project was launched in Yemen. Today, take-home programmes in 16 countries are giving millions of girls the chance to achieve literacy, according to WFP.