FORMER United States first lady Michelle Obama and Hollywood actress Julia Roberts today reflected on their recent trip to Vietnam with Girls Opportunity Alliance and noted the importance of investing in education for young girls to ensure a better future.

“Truth and right are not just going to come from the mind of a male. If we are under-investing in half of the planet’s population, I guarantee you that we are missing some right answers,” Obama said as she and Roberts took to the stage on the third day of the Obama Foundation Leaders: Asia-Pacific Conference in Kuala Lumpur today.

The Girls Opportunity Alliance is an initiative under the Obama Foundation that focuses on funding grassroots organisations such as Room to Read and Rock-Paper-Scissors Children’s Fund, which ensure young girls in the world get equal access to education.

Room to Read is a programme that transforms the lives of children in low-income communities by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education while the Rock-Paper-Scissors Children’s Fund provides learning opportunities for young students through its art and music programmes.

One of the recent projects by the Rock-Paper-Scissors Children’s Fund is giving bicycles to girls who live in rural and poor villages in Vietnam to help them get to school, as many of them walk one or more hours one way to school and even became targets of human trafficking.

With Girls Opportunity Alliance’s tagline “The future of our world is only as bright as our girls”, Obama’s resounding advocacy to global girls’ education was triggered by the fact that 98 million girls worldwide are not getting the education that they deserve, partly due to poverty and their parent’s concerns on their safety.

“We are not going to move forward if half of the population are left out of the conversation,” she said in the plenary session, which was moderated by former Miss Malaysia and television host Deborah Henry.

Obama said every child was born with a temperament in them, which would either get invested in and be developed or squandered by their surroundings.

She said self-advocacy and self-confidence should be instilled in the minds of young children early on and that the young leaders in Asia-Pacific should be that light in the lives of these kids who do not get that from their support system.

“My parents were not wealthy, not well connected, and they did not go to college themselves, but they gave me a sense of belief that my voice and what came from my mouth were clever and they were interested in it.

“Intellect knows no gender, possibility does not know race, and it does not know religion,” said Obama, who was a graduate from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

The five-day programme, organised by the Obama Foundation, saw 200 rising leaders from 33 nations and territories across the region coming together. – Bernama, December 12, 2019.