; and (2) the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives. 3. Purpose and findings (a) Purpose The purpose of this Act is to support empowerment, economic security, and educational opportunities for adolescent girls around the world. (b) Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) Adolescence is a critical period in a girl’s life, when significant physical, emotional, and social changes shape her future. (2) According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), approximately 130,000,000 girls around the world are not in school and millions more are failing to acquire basic reading, writing, and numeracy skills. (3) Girls between the ages of 10 and 19 are three times more likely than boys to be kept out of school, particularly in countries affected by conflict. (4) Due to discriminatory gender norms and expectations, disparities in access to safe and quality education manifest early in a girl’s life and continue to become more pronounced throughout adolescence. (5) Adolescent girls who are not in school are particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, child, early and forced marriage, and other forms of violence which are detrimental to their futures, as evidenced by the following statistics: (A) Each year, 380,000 adolescent girls and young women become newly infected with HIV, more than 1,000 every day, and comprise the fastest-growing demographic for new infections in sub-Saharan Africa. (B) Each year, 15,000,000 adolescent girls around the world are married before their 18th birthday, and more than 700,000,000 women alive today were married as children. (C) One-quarter to one-half of girls in developing countries become mothers before the age of 18, and girls under 15 are five times more likely to die during childbirth than women in their 20s. (6) While two-thirds of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education, only 40 percent have achieved gender parity in secondary education. (7) Adolescent girls who