This International Day of the Girl, ‘you are allowed to still be becoming’
Oct. 11 was the 2026 International Day of the Girl, a day set aside by the United Nations to honor girls’ rights and advance opportunities for women around the world.
On Dec. 19, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/170 to declare Oct. 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child. In 2012, the world celebrated the day for the first time.
Located just outside of downtown Raleigh, Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy (WYWLA) has turned the global day into a local tradition. The all-girls leadership magnet middle school and early college high school welcomed its inaugural class in 2012, and has annually celebrated the International Day of the Girl ever since.
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Cori Greer-Banks, the director of Carolina K-12 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a former classroom teacher, delivered a keynote at WYWLA’s 14th annual celebration on Oct. 8. In it, she left students with three actions:
Use your voice.
Protect your mind.
Bring another girl with you.
Use your voice
Each year, WYWLA concludes their Day of the Girl celebration with a student talent show. This year, students played piano covers of Taylor Swift’s “Champagne Problems” and Yiruma’s “River Flows in You,” performed poetry pieces and a vocal duet, and owned the stage in group dances.
The showcase reinforces a central message of the Day of the Girl: investing in girls means creating opportunities for them not only to be heard, but also to lead, create, and define their own futures.
Protect your mind
Greer-Banks told students that many of the messages young women hear today ask them to achieve impossible standards: to be ambitious, but not bossy; independent, but not intimidating; beautiful, but subjected to a constantly changing standard of beauty.
“No — you are allowed to still be becoming,” she said. “You’re allowed to change your mind. You’re allowed to fail at something. You’re allowed to ask for help.”
This year, over 30 women from the community volunteered to lead sessions about their careers for WYWLA’s students. Young women spoke with entrepreneurs, educators, financial advisers, nonprofit leaders, and more.
Durham District Attorney Satana Deberry was one of the speakers. Her ask of a captivated group of middle school students echoed Greer-Banks’ second call to action: “Read everything you can get your hands on … Be curious. Be curious about life. Be curious about your studies. Be curious about other people, yourself.”
At the end of the day, one sixth grader reflected that, after hearing Deberry speak, she decided that she wants to study law, too.
Bring another girl with you
Greer-Banks’ last charge to young women is to remember that their peers are not their competition.
She told students to celebrate the women in their lives, to say their names in rooms they aren’t in, and to surround themselves with women who do the same.
“A woman who understands her own worth does not have to diminish another woman to prove it,” she said.
This year’s International Day of the Girl theme
This year’s International Day of the Girl theme calls for “urgent action to end child marriage and invest in girls’ rights.”
Every girl deserves a childhood. Every girl deserves the freedom to learn, to grow, to make her own choices and to define her own future. Yet millions of girls are still denied that freedom.
— The United Nations
Greer-Banks said that over the past 25 years, an estimated 68 million child marriages were prevented through girls’ education, legal reform, social protection, and changing expectations around what girls deserve.
“Sixty-eight million girls are evidence that change is possible,” she said. “Progress happens because people decide that the way things are, are not the way they must remain.”
