Intervention make by Winifred during the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, Fourth session (18 June 2013)  If you slide the cursor along to 38 you can hear the intervention.

Good Morning,  thank you co-chair for this opportunity.  What I am going to say is based on the experience of my Organization – Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd –working in 72 countries focusing specifically on girls living in poverty.  I don’t want to give the list or outline the problem statement but I want to say that girls while they are part of the youth population are the untapped potential at the bottom of the youth pyramid.  Education is the answer.  I would like to take up -of the cuff as it were- the co-chairs challenge with regard to nuclear energy and military expenditure competing with education and I will add to that profit driven corporations and multinational and gender inequality.   The High Level panel talked about transformative shifts and one of them is ‘that nobody would be left behind’ and I say ‘Leave no girl behind’.  Investment in girls is investment in sustainable development and one program that could answer this challenge is implementation of a social protection floor.  We talk of quality education, access to education that is part of the social protection floor together with access to health, together with access to some kind of income to enable people to come out of poverty. Girls are not even registered at birth.  So I think we have to bring the issues of the Dollar, versus people living in poverty versus the girl who is not educated to the table and we have to change our minds as to where the investment will occur.   Thank you.

Read the full Statement to OWG June 18, 2013