In an age of troubled futures with prophesized self-annihilation, our hopes search for a savior or solutions to the challenges facing us. We needn’t look far, for our saviors and solution are half of those among us: Women.
According to a United Nations press release, the entire human race is currently tallied at just below 7 billion and growing to an estimated 9 billion by 2050, a time and place when resources will run deathly thin.
Action must be taken now to prevent such extravagant potential destinies from materializing into our fateful reality. In order to solve it naturally, birthrates must quickly be sedated. The most simple, fundamental and proven way to reduce fertility rates is to educate and emancipate women, especially young women, to give them prospects of a chosen, independent life, rather than one out of pre-destination.
With Earth’s ever-rapidly growing population — especially in countries like India, Somalia and Sudan, countries that already have difficulties supplying sufficient food and water resources — energy consumption rates will be difficult to calculate in the next few decades. Last November, Scientific American reported that since 1992 and 2001, India has nearly doubled its energy ingestion. According to a study published by the U.N. last October, Asia does not have the resources required to feed the additional 1.5 billion individuals expected in 2050.
A project to help dismantle the impoverished lives that hold underprivileged women to lead utterly limited lives has been initiated by bright minds at the world’s largest investment bank, Goldman Sachs. According to The New York Times, in March 2008, the banking leviathan presented a plan that would spend $100 million to teach business and management to 10,000 women across the globe. The program is primarily aimed at women in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who might not otherwise have access to an education that they could put to use to expand and build on their local economies.
American-based institutions, such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business are working with local universities abroad to run the program.
Today, branches of the 10,000-women project hold graduations for students in India and Nigeria. Many alumni of the project have begun their careers and received many accolades for their outstanding performance in their respective fields.
The concept is so simple, yet so necessary to be taken earnestly. When a majority of Asia’s female population are given the tools to construct a sound future, fertility rates will gradually begin to make their descent, diminishing the need for food and resource production, ultimately preserving our natural resources, reducing pollution, and prolonging our preconceived theory of living on an inhabitable planet.
Reach Tim at timothy.isenman@asu.edu
