Ripple

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Ripple, by John Wood.

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.

Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow.

Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women.

I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries. Each with equal access for all children.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

John Wood is Founder & Executive Chairman, Room to Read, which has built over 850 schools and opened over 7,500 libraries serving 3 million children. He is the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.