ABOUT US
60 million girls is a Montreal-based public foundation dedicated to girls’ education in developing countries. Wanda Bedard, 60 million girls’ founder and president, established the Foundation in 2006 to address a glaring need: 60 million primary-aged girls around the world were out of school, more than half the global total at the time.
Today, while enrolment rates are higher, millions of children continue to lack access to a quality education. This is particularly true in times of crisis, such as climate-related emergencies, disease outbreaks and pandemics, or armed conflicts, when girls are often the first to be pulled out of school.
Our team of talented, creative and energetic volunteers are working to address this imbalance. We strongly believe in the need to support education for all children, regardless of gender, wealth, or place of birth, to create a more just and balanced world.
Our objective is to support at least two major education-related projects in developing countries every year. Our projects focus on reducing gender disparity in school enrolment and improving the quality of education so that children who are in school can learn—and better tackle climate change. The Foundation takes a holistic approach to problem solving, and promotes educational technologies giving children, and their communities, access to better learning materials and teaching resources.
To achieve our goal of gender equality in educational opportunities, we partner with Canadian charities that have a proven and sustainable track record.
60 million girls is a volunteer-based organization with no paid staff or office space. We gratefully benefit from free services offered by many professionals and companies, helping us to minimize administrative costs. In fact, 99% of our funds go directly to the children we support.
The Foundation’s volunteers come from different walks of life, professions and age groups. Yet, we all share a strong commitment to contributing to the world as best we can by supporting the power of education.
Sustainability
While climate action is in the process of being integrated into the educational projects we support, the foundation is also sensitive to the impact generated by our own activities.
60 million girls aims to make climate change and sustainability central to its values and culture – and to our projects. As a result, the foundation is striving to develop an internal culture of climate change awareness and sustainability among its volunteers and partners. Initiatives such as virtual work, efforts on “no-printed documents”, cloud storage and virtual events have been adopted in recent years. Furthermore, we have financed solar panels for some of our education projects since 2014. Reducing our carbon footprint is a dynamic process and the foundation is mindful of improving even more on that front in the future.