Towards equal education for girls around the world

In the past 10 years more children have had better opportunities to attend school, but nearly a billion people still receive little or no education. Most of them are girls and women. An international conference taking place online and in Dakar, Senegal, is bringing together education activists, academics, practitioners, policy makers and girls themselves to debate and develop ways to ensure a better deal for women in education around the world. Titled E4 Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality, this innovative conference is using both electronic media and participatory discussion.

The e-conference begins on Monday, 12 April, for the five weeks leading up to the May 17-20 Dakar event, to open up the discussion and allow the broadest possible participation in the E4 initiative. Both conferences will examine issues of violence, poverty and educational quality and their intersections with participation, climate change and health.

The E4 conferences are organised jointly by UNGEI, the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative, and a team from the Institute of Education, London, led by Elaine Unterhalter, Professor of Education and International Development.

The organisers hope to develop and deepen partnerships among activists, practitioners, policy-makers and scholars, national and international, concerned with girls' education and gender to build knowledge and to plan collectively for policy and practice.

In a situation analysis prepared for the E4 Conference, Professor Unterhalter summarises what has been done so far:

Despite money invested, problems persist. There are still major obstacles in realising rights to education, in education and through education for many millions.

In 2009, 40 countries, with the largest complement in Africa, were considered unlikely to meet the goal of gender parity in primary school enrolments. 50 countries still have such large disparities in enrolments in favour of boys that they are unlikely to achieve gender parity in secondary education by 2015.

Many countries have achieved enormous improvements in gender parity in enrolment and attendance, but UNESCO analyses of attendance show that being poor, rural and a girl means that attendance in school is much less likely to be regular.

Partnerships for gender equality in education have faced considerable difficulties in reaching the poorest quintiles, ensuring quality or equity in post primary transfer. Some reasons for this relate to inadequate resources or political commitment, others to the complex web of global inequalities associated with poverty.