; and (2) the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Appropriations of the Senate. 3. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Adolescence is a critical period in a girl’s life, when significant physical, emotional, and social changes shape her future. (2) Adolescent girls 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) Child marriages often interrupt schooling, limit opportunities, and impact the physical, psychological and social well-being of such girls. If there is no reduction in child marriage, the global number of women married as children is projected to reach 1,200,000,000 by 2050. (D) 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. (3) 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. (4) 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. (5) 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. (6) Girls living with disabilities are less likely to start school and transition to secondary school than boys living with disabilities and other children, and just 1 percent of women with disabilities are