Prior to the pandemic, girls' enrollments in school had seen significant improvements in Asia. But with the pandemic, those gains have been wiped out.

UNESCO estimates that about 24 million learners, from pre-primary to university level, are at risk of not returning to school following the education disruption.

Almost half of them are found in South and West Asia besides Africa.

Asia was doing well prior to the pandemic, having brought down the number of girls out of school from 30 million to 15 million in the last two decades.

Almost all Asian countries with the exception of Pakistan and Timor-Leste had fared well by sending girls to schools.

In fact, with more girls in schools, Asia had posted decreasing trends in child marriage prior to the pandemic.

With the pandemic playing spoilsport, it will be difficult to sustain the tempo.

With an estimated 200,000 more girls experiencing child marriage in South Asia in 2020, the figures are expected to skyrocket as the ordeal from the pandemic is still lingering in many Asian nations.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is mulling raising the marriage age from 18 to 21 for girls, but the move has proved difficult to implement in a country of 1.3 billion people.

A parliamentary panel report, which focused on the empowerment of women through education, observed the probability of more adolescent girls opting out of school permanently is high.

The report said that girls away from school will end up doing household tasks and providing childcare due to the economic hardships of their families.

Though the panel has recommended targeted scholarships, conditional cash transfers, provision of bicycles, access to smartphones and hostel facilities to woo girls back to school, going by India's track record in looking after the welfare of its marginalized, these sops may remain only on paper.

In Vietnam, the legal age to wed is 18, but UNICEF said one in 10 girls is married before that age. Tying the nuptial knot early is mainly prevalent among ethnic groups in the communist country.

Asia is known for its migrant workers.

But the pandemic caused job losses and many are stuck at home.

When family members are hit by Covid-19, the onus of looking after patients falls on girls. So at home, care responsibilities have dramatically increased for girls who were forced to skip classes due to their ethnic minority status.

The cost of school fees was identified as a major barrier to girls' education in Asia.

With a bleak economic future awaiting their parents combined with existing attitudes that devalue girls' education, more girls are being taken out of school forever in Asia.

University students are most affected due to the tuition costs related to their studies.

Pre-primary education comes next.

While Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and to a greater extent India are on track to achieve gender parity in primary education, Pakistan and Afghanistan are woefully lagging.

Those girls who will be spared the tyranny of early motherhood have already assumed the new role of child labourers.

These young hands are going to do more harm than good to the existing labour market in Asia which is facing the problem of plenty as the pandemic rendered many migrant workers jobless.

This excess supply of girl labourers will further reduce the bargaining power of men and women working in unorganized sectors such as construction and garment-making.

At home, these girls become an easy target for family violence.

Heightened calls to helplines were reported in Singapore, Malaysia and India after the pandemic hit.

In Vietnam, domestic violence has doubled since Covid-related measures were introduced.

Education was the last resort for many Asian girls to lead a respectable and meaningful life.

What they need is a compassionate treatment to help them wade through the new normal.

The tiny Catholic Church in Asia, which claims to have pioneered modern education in most Asian nations, could play a vital role to change the fate of Asian girls and society itself.

But that can happen only if the hierarchy becomes aware of the challenges to the mission.

• Ben Joseph is a journalist of more than two decades of experience. Ben worked with leading publications like the New Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle, Business Standard, Times of India and Muscat Daily. He writes about Asian politics and human rights issues.
• First published in UCANews. Republished with permission.

While official inflation is under control, housing costs have increased at twice the rate of wages and other incomes. With many families spending more than 60 per cent of their income on rent or mortgage payments.

Not enough remains for food and other essentials such as transport, clothing and health costs.

Despite recent improvements in the economy the latest figures released by the Office of the Children's Commissioner, show there are still 305,000 (2 in 5) Kiwi kids living in hardship.

No matter how poverty is defined, increasing numbers of our children belong to families who are poor by New Zealand standards.

There are real concerns about the standard of nutrition these children receive, evidence they miss out on adequate health care, and are also not making the most of educational opportunities.

Financial hardship places enormous pressure on family life and affects the emotional well-being of both the parents and the children, so they are often not able to make the best choices.

While some sideline critics are obsessed with questioning how hardship in New Zealand is measured and argue that it is all the fault of the parents, there are children going without who just wish they were equal with their peers.

When people compare conditions here to those in third world countries and say "that's where the real poverty is", they are effectively saying that because some countries are worse than New Zealand children who are deprived here should just be bloody grateful.

It is not a competition. We are not a Third World country and therefore we should not have children contracting Third World illnesses, and unsure of where and when their next meal will come from. Continue reading

• Julie Chapman is CEO of the KidsCan Charitable Trust. This article was published in the Dominion Post.

• Black (78%) and white (69%) Americans are substantially more likely than Hispanic Americans (52%) to say they are somewhat or very likely to watch the Super Bowl this year.
• Although solid majorities of both genders report that they are somewhat or very likely to watch the Super Bowl this year, men (73%) are more likely than women (58%) to say they are likely to watch the game.
• Two percent of Americans report that the team they identify with most closely is the San Francisco 49ers, while one percent say the same of the Baltimore Ravens.
• More than 4-in-10 (42%) Americans who seldom or never watch sports nevertheless report that they are very or somewhat likely to watch the Super Bowl this year.

Professional football is, by far, Americans' most-watched or followed sport: nearly half (48%) of Americans who watch college or professional sports at least a few times a year say professional football is the sport they follow most closely, while around 1-in-10 say the same of college football (12%) or professional basketball (11%). Less than 1-in-10 report that they follow major league baseball (7%) or college basketball (6%) most closely.

Most Americans (55%) say that football has replaced baseball as America's national sport, while more than one-third (36%) disagree.

Americans are less likely to believe that God plays a role in the outcome of sporting events than they are to believe God rewards religious athletes. While only about 3-in-10 (27%) Americans, believe that God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event, a majority (53%) believe that God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success, compared to 42% who disagree. There are substantial differences by religious affiliation on all of these questions. Continue reading

Sources

• Public Religion Research Institute
• Image: The Guardian

A new study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that one-third of the country believes God plays a role in determining which team wins.

And Americans are even more certain about the players themselves. A majority believe God rewards individual athletes who are faithful to God with good health and success.
This kind of thinking about faith and success follows a broader religious trend. Over the past 50 years, American Christians have gravitated toward spiritual explanations for why winners deserve their rewards.

The default rationalizations — Good things happen to good people! Everything happens for a reason! — are no longer simply clichés. They are the theological bedrock for one of the most popular contemporary movements:

The American prosperity gospel.

Millions of American Christians now agree that faith brings health, wealth and victory. This movement, which began in the Pentecostal revivals of the post-World War II years, has become a commonplace theological framework for how faith works to secure God's blessings.

For the past eight years, I have studied the American prosperity gospel. Basically, it contends that believers must learn to speak positive words (called "positive confessions") to unleash spiritual forces that move God to act. Faithful people can know that their prayers and actions are working by their effects: a healthy body, a rising bank account, an ability to overcome life's obstacles. The pursuit of happiness is no longer simply an inalienable right — it's a divine mandate.

When people say God rewards certain teams or athletes, their opinions usually reflect a range of explanations — from "hard prosperity" to "soft prosperity" — for how people earn wins or losses.

Hard prosperity draws a straight line between the believer's faith to his circumstances. Did a player tithe 10 percent of his income? Did an unspoken sin block his prayers? Continue reading

Sources

• Kate Bowler in nj.com
• Image: Spirit Meat Readers

Kate Bowler is an assistant professor of American Christianity at Duke University's Divinity School.