"There is no limit to what we as women can accomplish" - Michelle Obama

Upon realising that 62 million girls worldwide are being deprived of their right to education, Michelle confessed that she felt a heartbreak. While addressing the audience at the Let Girls Learn Event on International Women’s Day, she began with the drumbeat of horrifying stories.

Malala Yousafzai had got shot in the head by terrorists simply for speaking the truth that girls should be able to go to school. More than 200 Nigerian girls got kidnapped from their school dormitory by a terrorist group determined to keep them from getting an education- grown men trying to snuff aspiration out of young girls, little girls being brutally assaulted on their way to school, being forced to marry and bear children when they are barely teenagers, girls across the globe facing grave dangers simply because they dared to act as full and equal human beings with potential; these are everyday realities in many portions of the globe.

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While travelling and meeting girls and interacting with experts across the world, Michelle Obama realised that the problem was not simply one of access to resources, rather it was about attitude and beliefs. The belief that girls simply are not worthy of an education, that women have no role to play outside of home, that their voices and minds do not matter, and that they should not be allowed to have control over their bodies.

Reflecting upon her own life, Obama revealed that in her time it was perfectly legal for employers to discriminate against women. They were deprived of a say in fundamental decisions about their bodies, and many of them still are. Domestic violence, in her time, was seen as a private matter between a man and his wife, and not as the horrific crime which it is.

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Even though a lot of progress has been made today, many of these rights in many corners of the globe are still under threat.

The freedoms that some of us take for granted aren’t set in stone. And they certainly did not descend from heaven. Basic rights for women were secured through long and hard battles waged by women and men both, who marched and protested to make their voice heard in boardrooms and courtrooms and voting booths and the hall of Congress. 

Education had been central to each of these efforts; the ability to read, write and analyse, the confidence to stand up and demand justice and equality, the qualifications to get your foot in that door, and take your seat at the table, all of it starts with education. Girls around the world today understand it. They feel it in their bones.

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Obama saw that determination in girls across national boundaries and ethnicities time and again; girls in Senegal studying on rickety desks in barely concrete classrooms raising their hands so hard that they are nearly falling out of their chairs. Girls in Cambodia who wake up hours before dawn, and ride their bikes just to go to school. Bangladeshi immigrant girls in the United Kingdom who study for hours each night and proudly carry their headscarves as part of their identity everywhere they go, resolutely ignoring the criticism of those who demean their religion.

These girls are risking everything- the rejection of their communities, the violation of their bodies, - everything, just to be able to go to school, each day. And when a horde of reporters shove microphones on their faces- these girls don’t blink. They stand up, and look straight into those cameras, and proudly explain who they want to be- doctors or teachers, forces of change in their countries.

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Obama proclaimed that education is the only path to self-sufficiency for these girls. Only chance to be able to shape their own fates and not have the limits of their lives dictated to them by others. And this is exactly what Michelle is passionate about- the hunger, which she sees in these girls, and their burning determination to rise up above their circumstances in life and reach for something more.  

Vidhi Bubna is a contributor with SheThePeople.TV