The average age of marriage for Yemeni girls is 12 or 13. Photo: Brajeshwar (flickr)

An article last week by the International Herald Tribune reported how Arwa Abdu Muhammad ran out of her husband’s house to a local hospital in Yemen, where she said her husband had beat and raped her for the last eight months. Arwa is nine years old.

Arwa sparked an international debate over child marriage. In Yemen and elsewhere, child marriages are a powerful illustration of misogyny and how it hurts developing economies.

The Global Gender Gap Index explains that women are a very important factor in the economy — when children are forced into young marriages, it leads to high rates of maternal and child mortality, an uneducated populace, and loss of economic opportunity.

The statistics speak for themselves. General health expert Dr. Abdullah Al-Kamil says a recent study found that the average age of marriage in Yemen is 12 or 13, and as Al-Kamil noted, “The problem here isn’t only early marriage, but also early pregnancy – and in most cases, early death.”

In a country where 30 percent of women between 15 and 19 have at least one child, early marriage and sky high maternal mortality rates are major causes of continuing poverty and underdevelopment. Suha Bashren, a policy officer from Oxfam, said she had no doubt that child brides were a significant reason Yemen’s ranking has recently fallen on the UN’s Human Development Index.

Yet in Yemen, poverty and conservative social values are driving forces in child marriage. Most parents in Yemen continue to believe that the earlier they marry their daughters, the better off their daughters will be. Early marriage is also encouraged by parents’ fears of girls being kidnapped and forcibly married, which is not uncommon.

Conservative Islamists supporting child marriage gained power after north and south Yemen reunited in 1990. In a government which recently modified laws to legally allow children under the age of 15 to marry, those against child marriage are a minority.

Because of Arwa’s bravery, child marriage is now being discussed. A few members of Parliament, such as Abdulbari Dughaish, are trying to change the laws in spite of religious opposition. The negative press within Yemen and internationally may be these children’s best hope for change — and their community's best hope for economic progress.

A recent article in The Economist explored the role financial illiteracy played in the subprime crisis and a growing global movement to improve financial education. Among projects mentioned in the article are Aflatoun, an Amsterdam-based program that attempts to "equip children with the knowledge and skills to become economically self-reliant citizens and empowers them to break the cycle of poverty through financial education." Another project discussed in the article was The President's Council on Financial Literacy, created by President Bush this past January.

John Hope Bryant, one of the vice chairman of the President's Council, is the founder of Project HOPE. Project HOPE has worked since the early '90s to use financial education as a way of alleviating poverty in urban communities.

At the Davos conference in January, Bryant summarized how financial education — what he calls the "Silver Rights Movement" — can reduce poverty.

Photo: Shirine Bakhat/Mercy Corps

You would think that female access to education within one country would be roughly the same. Not so for Afghani girls trying to get ahead.

Radio Free Europe explores the deep inadequacies in education offered to female Afghani students. Educational opportunities are vastly different for female students in northern provinces and their female counterparts in southern Afghanistan.

The problem emerges not only from a lack of funds, but increasing lack of security due to the Taliban's presence in the south. Schools have been burned down by members of the Taliban and female teachers terrorized or killed.

The connection between education, female economic empowerment and poverty alleviation is essential and the growing inability of female students in the south to access safe educational opportunities worrisome.

Read the article and also check out what Mercy Corps is doing in Afghanistan.

What does it take to combat the barriers to education that exist for some people? A school in India run by the Arundohaya organization is aiming to find out and to overcome them, according to The Independent.

By setting up self-help groups, providing training in such skills as sewing and tailoring and helping organise micro-credit schemes, Arundohaya is able to help families provide an alternative income that allows them to send their children to school.

Bernd Debusmann published an article today examining the extreme lack of foreign language and international training among Americans.

Debusmann points out that this isn't a new trend, and despite the surge of American citizens enrolling in Arabic language classes post 9/11, about half the number of American college students enroll in foreign language classes today as compared to 1965.

The book was entitled "The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis" and its author found that a deficit of language skills threatened U.S. business and national security. That was in 1980. The words "globalization" and "jihad" had not yet become household terms.

Fast forward to the present and the latest report on foreign languages and international education by the research council of the National Academies: "A pervasive lack of knowledge about foreign cultures and foreign languages threatens the security of the United States as well as its ability to compete in the foreign market place."

So has nothing changed since the late Paul Simon, then a congressman, later a senator, warned about the consequences of a tongue-tied America? Judging from a wealth of statistics, there has been much effort but little progress.

The New York Times reported yesterday on India's primary school shortage. Recent changes to admissions rules intended to be more fair and transparent, are giving parents anxiety attacks as they try and secure placement in a reputable school for their prekindergarten-aged children.

A Brazilian anti-poverty program known as Bolsa Familia ("Family Fund") is getting attention from governments around the world, writes the Economist. Modeled on a similar program in Mexico, this conditional cash transfer program has been tested successfully in several other Latin American countries, and the World Bank is now looking to start similar programs in Eastern Europe.

In the Brazilian version of the program, poor families with children receive direct transfers of around 70 reals (about $35) a month, on the condition that their children stay in school and have regular health checkups. According to the World Bank, this relatively simple and modest program is unique in that it can help reduce both current and future poverty and inequality in Brazil.

Children learn based on their teachers-- and often national policy regarding education. This month's issue of Foreign Policy explores how the way Germany and France teach economics may spell a dismal economic future.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s great democracies—France and Germany.

Today Business Week takes a look at Toyota and corporate responsibility:

Harish, who comes from a family that lives below the poverty line of $177 in annual income, was a good student but had no particular ambition. Then, last April, his schoolteacher alerted him to an advertisement by Toyota in the local paper. The automaker was inviting applications from 17-year-old, poor and needy students for factory training. It was offering free board, lodging, and education, plus a monthly stipend of $38. There were 5,000 applicants, and Harish was one of 64 boys from the southern state of Karnataka who made it to Toyota Tech, the training institute that opened last August as Toyota's first outside of Japan.

He now wants to be an automotive engineer. "I am so happy and can't believe," says Harish in his broken English about how his life and dreams have changed. They sure have. His mother and grandmother earn 65¢ daily as farm laborers, a brother is a bus cleaner, and a sister is training to be a nurse. But Harish is determined to change his life thanks to Toyota. In the three months he has been at the institute, he has saved $8 to give to his mother. "I want to make her proud," he says, outlining his determination to excel in his three-year course and bag the $180 and $230 fellowships for assiduous students.