Gender equality? Pipedream for girls, reveals Save the Children report

Seven seconds usually isn't enough time to do much. But here's some sad perspective:

One girl under the age of 15 is married every seven seconds in the world, with even younger girls - as little as 10 years old - married off to much older men in countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, India and Somalia. This and other alarming facts have come to light in the latest report, called Every Last Girl, by the NGO Save the Children.

The report ranks countries on the basis of most difficult places for a girl to live in. It looks at development parameters like schooling, child marriage, teen pregnancy, maternal deaths and the number of women in parliament. Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Mali and Somalia are ranked at the bottom of the index.

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The report explores three core barriers that impede the progress of the girl child - child marriage, poor access to good-quality services that include health and education and the lack of female representation in private and public spheres.

"Today is the International Day of the Girl Child, and while there is much to celebrate, there is still a mountain to climb until we reach a world in which girls will have the same opportunities as boys," Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children International and Kevin Watkins, CEO of Save the Children UK, said in a joint statement.

They spoke about young girls like Zahra, a pregnant 14-year-old - married off at the age of 11 - who was set alight by her husband in Afghanistan after allegedly getting stabbed and tortured by his family.

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"Zahra's experience was extreme in its brutality and inhumanity, but it reflects a world in which poverty and discrimination combine to deny millions of children the right to survive, learn and be safe - simply because they are girls. A world in which every year 15 million children become brides; in which twice as many girls as boys never start an education, and many more fail to complete it; and in which childbirth is the second cause of death for adolescent girls," they said in the statement.

The report has a slew of statistics that serve as stark reminders of the worldspace where the position of women is always under threat at every level. It points out how even in current times, in countries including Bangladesh, Mali and Niger, two thirds of girls are married before their eighteenth birthday. At this pace, the push towards the UN target of ending child marriage by 2030 looks rather bleak - the rate of reduction of child marriage is a shocking one percent a year, an eighth of what's needed.