The daily trip to high school was expensive, long and eventually, too much for Indian teenager Nahid Farzana, who decided she was going to drop out. Then, the state government gave her a bicycle.
Two years later, she is about to graduate from high school and wants to be a teacher.
The government program, designed to help girls in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, has been so successful at keeping teenage girls in school, the bike giveaways have spread to neighboring states.
The female literacy rate in some states (53 percent) is more than 20 points below that of rates for males.
(READ the story from CS Monitor – or the Dec. 2011 story in CurentInternational.org)