I have this funny way of introducing myself,” says Judithe Registre, Vice President of Programs at Girl Rising. “I describe myself as Haitian-born, American-made, and globally-centered.”

For Registre, that global journey started when she immigrated to the US at the age of 12, continued when she completed her post-graduate work in South Africa and began a career in international development. It has since brought her all over Africa and to over a dozen countries including Egypt, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam.

It’s also no surprise to Registre that she now works for Girl Rising, an organization that’s harnessing the power of storytelling to change the way the world values girls and their education —because she’s been fighting for girls’ rights since she was eight years old.

“I joke about the idea that I’ve always been a feminist long before I understood what the word feminism was,” she explains.

It all started one day in school when Registre and the other girls in her class were taught to learn how to wash—“with one exception, the boys didn’t have to do that. And I remember being very confused about being asked to go learn how to wash my clothes when the boys didn’t have to.”

“And I became, I don’t want to say adamant as much as I needed answers. And it wasn’t enough to say well, that’s just the way it is.”

The moment turned out to be a defining one for Registre’s life and work.

“It started to actually help me to really look at the world and the role that people were playing in it—how did they come to play this role? Did they accept it? Did they sign up for it? And then feeling like we have the freedom or the choice to play a different role.”

In her higher academic work, Registre chose to study philosophy—a decision that surprised many around her. But for Registre, philosophy was a lens to understand the world more broadly—a tool combining economics, political science and anthropology that served as a framework to begin asking questions about the world.

As Registre began asking questions from a feminist perspective, she became more acutely aware of how educating girls at a young age empowers them to rise above their circumstances and shape their own future.

“Because those vulnerabilities start when they are a girl. And if you wait to invest in women and not in girls, you’ll be fighting a battle for generations to come around this issue of gender inequity.”

最后,女孩寻求植物th上升e seeds that can put a girl on a “lifelong path” to continued learning—even if their circumstances become limited by say, an arranged early marriage. But for Girl Rising, it’s not enough for girls just to be educated. At the end of the day, says Registre, it’s about affirming their basic humanity, like the struggle currently playing out globally as U.S. protests from the Black Lives Matter Movement gain international attention and momentum.

Read the full article aboutJudithe Registreby Amber Cortes at Global Washington.