ENGLISH SPEECH | SHAKIRA: Education Changes the World (English Subtitles)

Good morning Your Highness, excellences, friends, and colleagues.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

It's also an honor to join forces with Educated Child, an organization led by a woman who

is an amazing role model — a woman who has shown such relentless dedication to getting

every child in school.

This is such an exciting day for us because it marks the beginning of a new era in my

home country Colombia.

Most of you may know me as an artist, as an entertainer, and that's indeed my calling

and what I've been doing since I was 13 years old, but I never would have imagined when

I started out that my work as an artist would end up being the vehicle for me to serve my

greater purpose in life of working towards eradicating poverty through the power of Education.

As a Colombian citizen inequality as a concept that sadly one becomes very familiar with

at a very young age.

It's a country like many others in Latin America where a few have a lot; a lot have almost

nothing and where if you're born poor, you will almost certainly die poor.

Where people don't access equal opportunities, and because of that generation after generation,

after generation live trapped in the same vicious cycle fed by prejudice and inaction.

Growing up in my country when I was around eight years old, I remember I saw kids my

age who, instead of being in school were already working in the streets, were barefoot in the

park.

Kids like me whose reality was completely different than mine only because of the circumstances

into which they were born.