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Exclusive Interview With Girl Rising Director Richard E. Robbins

Documentary filmmaker Richard E. Robbins has spent close to six years making Girl Rising, a documentary about the lack of opportunity for females in developing countries to get a good education. Robbins and his crew traveled to several places – among them, India, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone – where the conditions for many young girls are squalid and shocking. There, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker found several girls whose lives had been changed by going to school.

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WGTC: Were there stories of girls that you wanted to feature in the documentary that unfortunately did not come to fruition?

RR: Yeah, there were tons. That’s always how it is in documentary [filmmaking]. You have to gather more than you can use. A couple of the girls who we initially selected to be in the film… when we went back to follow up with them, they weren’t where they had been. That’s just a reality. They don’t have a phone, they’re no longer at their address. How are you going to find them?

WGTC: In a column you wrote in the Huffington Post last year, you wrote that this issue of educating girls “was not my life’s work… it was not my calling. It was just an idea floating around the vast universe of ideas, that bumped into me and stuck.” How is it still sticking with you today?

RR: I have a nine-year-old daughter. I think a lot about how those lessons impact the way I parent. And I’m still in contact with those girls [in the film]. I think they will be an ongoing presence in my life. I had a pretty deep immersion in the lives of a wide variety of other people. That changes you for the better. I spent a lot of years at ABC News and had traveled through a lot of the world but this was a very different, more intimate, more personal interaction with people who don’t generally make the news. It’s one of the reasons why they tend to stay in the shadows.

WGTC: Where in the world are girls making big gains in getting education, jobs and more gender equality?

RR: As a sheer statistical phenomenon, Afghanistan is making the biggest strides. That’s also partly because it came from the lowest point. If you look back to how many girls were in school in Afghanistan 10 years ago to how many are in school today, it’s extraordinary. Millions more. That’s exciting. That’s not to say they don’t have an incredible long way to go and the challenges are enormous, but they are making massive progress. Both Central and South America, and to a lesser extent southeast Asia, have really crossed the divide in terms of basic benchmarks like gender equality in primary schools, too. There, enrollment for girls is almost on par with enrollment for boys. At least in primary school – it’s a much different story in secondary school. That’s a really exciting change and that’s really just within the last 10 or 15 years.

WGTC: There are a lot of fundraising initiatives and movements tied to Girl Rising. The film has been screened at many schools and for big groups. How can we help the most on a charity or volunteer level on behalf of girls’ education?

RR: I think that it really depends on what your capacity to get involved is. Obviously, we try not to be coy about the fact that there is a huge financial gap between what these girls have and what they need. Money does matter. People don’t like to hear that – they want to hear there’s something they can do that’s more spiritual or personal, but money matters a lot.

And I think the good news in terms of where we are today is that a lot of people are thinking and talking about this issue and it’s possible in the modern world to make really intelligent and informed choices about where you want to give your money or time. 20 years ago, you would write a cheque and send it off into the world and keep your fingers crossed. Now, with the internet, we are so connected that you really can track where your dollar or time investment goes. And you can find things to invest in that matter to you. Do you want to help build schools? Do you want to help build libraries? Do you want to help buy school supplies?

I try to tell people all the time, It’s the right thing to do for other people in the world but it’s also incredible rewarding, personally, to feel like you’ve made a difference in someone’s life.

That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Richard very much for his time! Be sure to check out Girl Rising as it’s now on DVD.