8 2) It promotes equality and the empowerment of minority women Minority women are among the most marginalized individuals in the world. They may also have had less access to schooling or opportunities to learn a majority or official language because of gender- or/and ethnic-based discrimination. Research shows that they perform particularly well when taught in their own language, thus increasing the likelihood of pursuing further studies or breaking out of the cycle of isolation and poverty. Communication with public services in vital areas for minority women such as health care often improves with effective use of their own language. Various initiatives show that the use of minority languages to reach women is particularly effective at increasing their participation and empowerment. “Viet Nam: When midwives and patients share a language, there are better results Research shows that one of the most important interventions for safe motherhood is to make sure that a trained health provider with midwifery skills is present at every birth. In Viet Nam, five to seven women die every day due to complications in pregnancy or childbirth. The highest numbers of deaths are in remote and mountainous ethnic minority areas, partly due to a shortage of skilled birth attendants and healthcare workers. Also, cultural barriers in those areas keep many women from using reproductive health services. To address this issue, the government and international development partners are supporting an initiative to train local women to become village-based midwives. The new midwives’ understanding of the language, culture, and belief systems of their patients is key to gaining trust and encouraging women to receive appropriate health services. “Women are satisfied with my work,” said Te, a newly trained midwife. “They trust me for several reasons: I was born and grew up in this village. Therefore they know me…and we belong to the same ethnic minority group and speak the same language.” That trust makes it easier for Te to approach women to provide a variety of health services and has contributed to overcoming certain traditions (including forest births) that have made mothers slow to access maternal health services in the past”. Source: UNESCO, Why Language Matters for the Millennium Development Goals (Bangkok: UNESCO, 2012), p.29. 3) It leads to better use of resources The use of minority languages in public education and other areas is financially more efficient and cost-effective. Official language-only education programmes can ‘cost about 8 per cent less per year than mother-tongue schooling, but the total cost of educating a student through the six-year primary cycle is about 27 per cent more, largely because of the difference in repetition and dropout rates’.6 It is also neither efficient nor cost-effective to spend money and resources on public information campaigns or public broadcasting in a language not well understood by the entire population. The use of minority languages in such cases is a better use of resources to reach all segments of society. 6 World Bank (note 2).