Zendaya: What inspired you to start Let Girls Learn?
Michelle Obama: This issue has always been personal for me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where most folks, including my parents, didn’t have college degrees. But with a lot of hard work — and a lot of financial aid — I had the chance to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School, and that gave me the confidence to pursue my ambitions. A few years ago, I had the honor of meeting a young Pakistani woman named Malala Yousafzai, who was shot and nearly killed just for trying to go to school. I also heard about how nearly 300 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped from their school dorms in the middle of the night. There are girls like this in every corner of the globe. In fact, there are more than 62 million girls worldwide not attending school, and that’s an outrage.
Z: You recently traveled to several countries, including Liberia, to promote education rights for girls. What did you witness?
MO: The girls I’ve had the privilege to meet in my travels are doing everything right. Many wake up before dawn to work in order to help support and tend to their families, even before they set foot in a classroom. At school, they are thoroughly engaged and determined to learn as much as they can. They dream of being engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and doctors—the same kind of dreams girls have here in the U.S.
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/zenda...et-girls-learn