Giving Compass' Take:

• Sarah Hillware created the Girls Health Ed program that offers health lessons for young girls going through puberty around the world, creating more access to health education and closing gender gaps worldwide. 

• How will health classes geared for women and girls help unlock their potential and ultimately provide them with more opportunities?

• Read more about the gender gap and how donors can address forms of gender inequality.

When Sarah Hillware was studying international affairs and global public health in 2012, she noticed that gender inequalities surged once girls reached puberty, and they never fully closed afterward.

She did case studies in Kenya, India, and in the United States, and the pattern remained the same everywhere. As she looked closer, she realized that these inequalities were often tied to whether schools had robust health programs that taught girls about how their bodies were changing as they transitioned into adults

Most of the time, such programs were nonexistent or severely limited and this absence, combined with prevailing cultural stigmas, squandered the potential of countless students.

So she decided to stage an intervention.

“We really wanted to create an intervention that would not only tackle really critical areas of health that perpetuate cycles of poverty, contributing to girls dropping out of school because of pregnancy, getting married because of taboos around menstruation, preventing them from getting proper nutrition during puberty, but really tie these things together,” she added.

Now, six years later, Hillware’s Girls Health Ed is transforming the lives thousands of girls around the world through a comprehensive program that teaches them about their health and well-being. The program is taught in Rohingya refugee camps, orphanages in India, and classrooms throughout the US.

Its goal is none other than to close the gender gap in all its forms.

Read the full article about bringing health class to communities by Joe McCarthy at Global Citizen