Jean Geran, Founder & President, Each Inc. Photo credit: Jean Geran
This year’s Women’s History Month theme is “Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating
Everyone loves a good story. Fairy tales take us to faraway lands and help us dream dreams. Horror stories scare us and make us appreciate our own security. The moral of a story can grow our character and teach us valuable principles. But the stories we love most are those that allow us to see new possibilities for our own story. Because the most valuable story for each of us is our own. I was fortunate to have parents who believed in their little girl’s potential and made me feel that I could accomplish anything if I set my mind to it. A ‘sky’s the limit’ mentality is not always the norm for young women in the United States and often remains unimaginable to women and girls around the world.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, I think about the millions of women and girls who hold up half the sky but feel invisible and trapped due to poverty, illiteracy, disease, abuse and other forms of marginalization and deprivation. At the top of the list of concern are the children, both girls and boys, living in adversity. Alone, scared, and vulnerable, children living outside family care in orphanages, refugee camps, brothels or the streets are the most invisible of all. No one knows their stories. Often they don’t even know their own. To survive, they must find food, shelter and protection but they often say that their greater struggle is their desire to be known and to belong somewhere. We all wrestle with personal identity. Imagine having nothing to start with.
Because each child has a unique story, I founded a social enterprise called Each Inc. that is developing technology products and services to help both practitioners working directly with children, and governments or researchers interested in aggregate data to improve policies and programs at a macro-level. The girl effect and other related efforts have been successful in raising awareness of the necessity and wisdom of investing in each girl’s future. To make those investments effectively it helps to know her story.
It’s difficult to find a solution for each child without having their case history data in a timely, usable form. How can you find families for orphans in institutions if you don’t know their family history? How can you safely reunify a trafficked child with their family if you don’t know who they are? Social workers are faced with these kinds of questions every day and the lack of data makes their difficult job even harder.
Improving data and technology systems in this field for practitioners would enable them to make more informed decisions for each child and share information securely for better collaboration. For government officials, particularly in underdeveloped countries, improvements are critical to strengthening child protection systems and to disaggregating data by gender to target assistance appropriately. The U.S. Government Action Plan on Children in Adversity includes these goals and I wrote about Each Inc.’s support for this effort here.
We are eager to work with individuals and organizations involved in the identification, care and protection of children. Each child has a story.
