Kal Raustiala, director of UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations, and Brian Gott, director of the Burkle Global Impact Initiative, attended an event at the White House Tuesday at the invitation of President and Mrs. Obama for the announcement of a new initiative under the “Let Girls Learn” campaign. The new program will promote community-based solutions for girls’ education worldwide and be led by first lady Michelle Obama.
The “Let Girls Learn” campaign, which supports a broad range of education programs to empower girls in developing countries, was launched in June 2014 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). To support the campaign, the Burkle Global Impact Initiative (BGI) produced a public service video (below) last summer featuring a slate of Hollywood celebrities that BGI helped recruit.
In her remarks at the White House, National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice expressed her appreciation to campaign organizers and “to UCLA and all the celebrities who participated in the Let Girls Learn campaign last summer — thank you for helping raise awareness about this vital issue.”
The Burkle initiative was established in 2013 to engage the entire entertainment industry — including the worlds of film, television, digital, publishing, live-performance and music — to address and promote critical international issues and better educate the public about international and humanitarian affairs.
“It was thrilling to see the ‘Let Girls Learn’ campaign grow from a small effort that we assisted USAID with to a full-blown program with the personal support and focus of President and Mrs. Obama," said Raustiala, associate vice provost of international studies and professor of law at UCLA. “Harnessing the power of Hollywood around critical international issues is exactly what we created BGI to do.”
Added Gott, “The purpose of the Burkle Global Impact Initiative is to use our unprecedented access to the creative community to activate the industry around pro-social issues that affect us all. The ‘Let Girls Learn’ campaign is exactly the type of program we can super-charge.”
The Obama administration plans to request $250 million in additional funding from Congress to support the effort. The enhanced funding will build on existing programs, including those being implemented in areas of conflict and crisis. The campaign will continue to leverage public and private sector funds through additional partnerships.
Mrs. Obama will soon travel to Japan and Cambodia later this month to begin championing the campaign for girls’ education internationally. “As part of this effort,” she said, “the Peace Corps is ... going to be eventually training all of its volunteers about gender and girls’ education. So even volunteers who are focusing on other issues like health care or agriculture can ... help support girls' education on the ground.”
The Peace Corps effort will be launched this year in Albania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Georgia, Ghana, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Togo and Uganda, with additional countries added the following year.
“Young girls forced into marriage and servitude by the backward ideology of groups like Boko Haram and ISIL,” Rice said. “Bands of violent rebels who use rape as a tactic of war to terrorize populations in places like Darfur. Millions of girls growing up in crises — living as refugees or fearing violence in Syria and Iraq; South Sudan and the Central African Republic; India and Pakistan, and so many other places.
“We can’t allow these challenges to rob generations of young women of their future,” she said.
Among its recent endeavors, BGI conducted research on the Millennium Development Goals in summer 2013 for documentaries produced by young filmmakers from developing countries. BGI has also teamed with Film Independent to create the Film Independent Humanitarian Award, first awarded to Ted Turner on June 12, 2014, in honor of his immense philanthropic contributions to humanitarian causes.
This story was excerpted from one posted the UCLA International Institute website.
