Advancing education and choice for women and girls in the Sahel.
We envision a healthy and resilient Sahel where women and girls are educated and free to make critical life choices.
OASIS Initiative Canada advances education and choice for women and girls, through programs, capacity building and policy advocacy. We work collaboratively with a strong network of partners based in the Sahel. Our core partners were co-founded by OASIS US and are now locally-led.
Why the Sahel?
The Sahel is a geographical region of Africa that lies between the Sahara Desert to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south. The population of the francophone Sahel countries and northern Nigeria will grow by more than two and a half times by the middle of the century, to 450 million people. At the same time, climate change will have serious negative effects on people's ability to grow staple crops - risking the food security of the region.
Why Women and Girls?
Women in the Sahel are among the least empowered in the world. Many don’t have a say in their own basic life choices, such as staying in school, seeking healthcare, when and whom to marry or whether to work outside the home. The region’s low median marriage age, high birthrates among adolescent mothers, rapid population growth, and low educational attainment are deeply intertwined with its social and environmental problems and unrest. By the same token, empowering women and girls by raising educational attainment, delaying marriage, and improving family planning access can dramatically improve outcomes in the Sahel and beyond.
Why Family Planning?
Voluntary, rights-based family planning is fundamental to women's empowerment and health. Beyond the health benefits of contraception — preventing unintended pregnancies, averting unsafe abortions and reducing maternal death — family planning offers a plethora of economic benefits to families, communities and countries. Every dollar invested in wider access to contraceptives yields $120 of annual social, economic, and environmental benefits — the highest return on investment of any social investment, second only to universal trade. Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, called it “the most important intervention for human development in the world.”
Why Education?
The Sahel region has some of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, and girls typically drop out of school when they get married. Staying in school longer enables girls to have more self-determination and is a key factor in delaying marriage and lowering fertility rates. Women who stay in school marry later, earn more, and have smaller, healthier families. They also are the hub of more resilient communities and stronger economies. Every 1% increase in girls’ secondary school completion rates in the Sahel leads to a 0.3% increase in national Gross National Income. If all girls in the Sahel could complete secondary school by 2030, GDP would rise an additional 10% on average, with even bigger cumulative economic returns after that.
Leveraging Better Outcomes
Improving access to family planning and quality education are strategic, mutually reinforcing interventions that enhance self-determination for women and girls. Together they have the highest cost-benefit ratio of any other social investment, and offer maximal leverage for positive outcomes in the Sahel region and beyond. Educated, empowered women tend to choose smaller families, slowing population growth in a rights-based context and generating a “demographic dividend” that can put the Sahel on the path away from poverty, scarcity, unrest and migration, and toward the Sustainable Development Goals. Gains in education and family planning lead to gains in other sectors, making Sahel communities healthier, more resilient, more prosperous, and ultimately more stable and secure.
Sources
Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions, “The Case for Holistic Investment in Girls: Improving Lives, Realizing Potential, Benefiting Everyone,” October 2020. Citi GPS, Plan International.
Dollar, D. and Gatti, R. (1999). Gender equality, income and growth: Are good times good for women? World Bank Group - World Bank Policy Research Report on Gender and Development. Working Paper Series No. 1.
Graves, A. (2020). Investing in Girls and Women Could Set Stage for Peace, Development in Sahel. New Security Beat. Wilson Center.
Graves, A., Rosa, L., Nouhou, A.M., Maina, F., Adoum, D. (2019). Avert catastrophe now in Africa’s Sahel. Nature 575:282-286.
Kohler, H., and Behrman, J. (2014). Benefits and costs of the population and demography targets for the post-2015 development agenda. Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Malala Fund and Brookings Center for Universal Education. (2015). Factsheet 1: The world’s best investment: Girls’ education. Malala Fund and Brookings Center for Universal Education.
Perlman, D. et al. (2016) Women’s Empowerment and Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda. eds Dworkin, S. L., Gandhi, M. & Passano, P. Univ. California Press: 72–92.
Smith, et al. 2014. Human health: impacts, adaptation, and co-benefits. In: Field, et al., eds. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. 709-754.
United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 2011-Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision (UN, 2017).
Our Board
Alisha Graves
Board Chair
Alisha Graves serves as the Board Chair of OASIS Initiative Canada. She is Executive Director of OASIS and a Founder of the OASIS Initiative at University of California, Berkeley. Alisha lectures internationally on population and food security in the Sahel. She is a research fellow for Project Drawdown, analyzing the potential contribution of family planning for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, she worked to improve women's access to misoprostol, a generic, essential medicine. In this role, she worked on drug registration, operations research, and advocating for evidence-based maternal health policies across seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. She completed her MPH in International Maternal and Child Health at UC Berkeley in 2006.
Holly Vear
Treasurer
Holly Vear is a lawyer based in British Columbia who works with First Nation governments across Canada to support their self-governance initiatives through community-driven processes; she strives to provide creative and effective solutions that reflect her clients’ indigenous legal customs and traditions. Her legal practice also involves working with various non-profit organizations to assist with compliance and operations. Holly volunteers as a director for a grassroots society focused on the compassionate management of human-wildlife conflict in urban environments.
Heather Kelly
Secretary
Dr. Heather Kelly is the Executive Director, Student Life Programs & Services at the University of Toronto and oversees a comprehensive program of services, activities and support for over 95,000 students. She is committed to supporting all students, particularly underrepresented and equity-deserving students, in finding their purpose through the integration of curricular and co-curricular experiences that encourage the achievement of their meaningful goals and interests. She also holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Toronto in Comparative, Development, and International Education.
“As we work towards ending poverty across the developing world, we know that educating adolescent girls and getting health services to women will lead to greater prosperity not just for individual families but also for entire economies.”
- World Bank Group President, Jim Yong Ki