International Girl Child’s Day 2021: All about this day
Every year, 11th October is celebrated as the International Girl Child’s Day. This UN observance day is celebrated to mark the significance of adolescent girls around the world and strives on empowering them by recognizing their potential and creating new opportunities to advance their lives. The day is also about strengthening and encouraging their voices and considering them a relevant part of the society.
The purpose behind observing this day is to address and eliminate the issues surrounding adolescent girl children. It is about making way for the young girls and ensuring they don’t continue facing gender discrimination or fall victim to violence, child marriages and lack of proper educational opportunities. This year, the theme of International Girl Child’s Day is ‘Digital Generation. Our Generation.’
History of International Girl Child’s Day
In 1995, at the Women’s World Conference in Beijing, China, the world first recognised and spoke about the rights of girl children around the globe. At this international conference, all the major participating nations unanimously drafted the blueprint to safeguard the interest of not only women but also adolescent girls that came to be known as Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
However, it was more than a decade later in 2011 when the United Nations General Assembly marked October 11th as the International Day of the Girl Child and issued a progressive resolution concerning their plight. Since then, this day has been celebrated focussing primarily on the day-to-day struggles and challenges faced by girl children and paving ways to fulfil their rights.
Significance of International Girl Child’s Day
Young teenage girls have a hard time surviving in this gender biased world. However, with the right number of opportunities and nurturing, today’s girls can turn out to be tomorrow’s liberated women in both public and private domains.
In 2015, the major nations adopted the Seventeen Points Sustainable Development Goals, that included important points, that of ensuring gender equality and women emancipation. To meet the committee’s 2030 agenda, International Girl Child’s Day is of utmost importance as it aims to improve the condition of young girls by offering them better and equal education opportunities, access to advanced healthcare in absence of discriminations and challenges. These will in turn enable them to change the world and solve global issues like climate crisis, economic development, political conflict, prevention and cure of diseases and contribute to the making of a sustainable world.
Theme of International Girl Child’s Day 2021
As already mentioned, the theme of International Girl Child’s Day 2021 is ‘Digital Generation. Our Generation.’ The Covid-19 pandemic has made the world shift to digital devices to continue with their learning and income however, unfortunately, almost 2.2 billion people still have no access to the internet. This has led to a severe digital divide, especially among young girls. In fact, globally speaking, this gender gap of internet use has furthered worsened with a shift from 11% in 2013 to 17% in 2020. For the underdeveloped countries, the rise in gap is almost up to 43%. However, in these times of digital revolution, where technology based new-age skills are changing lives of millions, young girls should no longer be overlooked.
The United Nations urges everyone to celebrate this day by being actively involved and promote their causes. People all over the world are asked to share personal experiences and inspiring stories about girl children through blogs, pictures and videos.