The Ted Talk by Leymah Gbowee - Essay Example

Some of the evidence that we can pick out from her talk are, for instance, a teenage girl being a mother of four, a grandfather rapping her granddaughter daily for six months till she becomes pale, a teacher wanting sexual favors in return for accepting a girl to study at her school and also teenage girls being sold for prostitution on less than a dollar per night (Ted Talk, 2012). She was also lamenting how we have policies such as the No Child Left Behind and UN Children's Rights Acts, but they do not seem to work.

Most of these points are true such as the alarming teenage pregnancy rate among children and also that most girls, particularly in Africa, fail to go to school mostly because they lack the resources or society will not let them. Today, girls are married off at young age or sold into prostitution denying them a chance to go to school. What the speaker was trying to stress is that society sees girls as tools instead of human beings, which is mostly true in some parts of the world, for instance, Liberia (Ted Talk, 2012). The only part where I tend to disagree with the speaker is that policies such as No Child Left Behind and UN Children's Rights. Most of these policies are effective in some regions, for example, the United States. It is up to these other regions like Liberia to effectively apply them.

In such a speech, to greatly deliver your message, you need to make people truly feel what you are talking about. For example, when talking about the situation in Liberia it would be significant to use video clips or pictures or even bring the girls from the region to tell the story themselves. This will at least give the audience a clear picture of the message being delivered. However, these presentations should not be more of something fancy, but convey the topic of the talk. Your speech should be simple, with a clear start, middle, and conclusion. Focus on one theme, and eliminate everything else. When Chris Anderson asked Gbowee what troubles her most about Liberia, she went into a lot of detail only to give a simple answer in her next response that it is teenage pregnancy (Ted Talk, 2012).

An advice that I could give Gbowee to help her improve her speech is that she needs to be short and direct with her responses. 

This might confuse your listeners especially if they are eager to know the answer.

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