Education experts representing United Nations agencies, donor countries, national governments and non-governmental organizations are meeting in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu today to discuss issues related to gender equality in education in the Asia-Pacific region.
Representatives from Camfed, UNICEF, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Nepal's Ministry of Education and the children of Nepal gave opening remarks.

'The low status of women and girls in our society is more...

On 7 July 2008, Southern Sudan celebrated its annual Girls’ Education Day, an opportunity to acknowledge achievements in girls’ enrollment and galvanize action to close the gender gap in education. This year celebrations were focused in the Lakes State capital of Rumbek where thousands of school children gathered in the town’s Freedom Square. The event, which was attended by representatives of the Government of Southern Sudan, Ministers of Education from all ten States, United Nations and more...

Dubai Cares, a charitable organization that aims to provide primary education to one million children in developing countries, today provided UNICEF with nearly 1.2 million dollars to fund educational programmes in Niger. The Niger initiative follows Dubai Cares’ previous partnerships with UNICEF in Djibouti, Sudan and Yemen and will eventually help fund education programmes in 12 countries. The Dubai Cares donation will benefit approximately 150,000 school children along with primary school t more...

The state of Bihar, India's poorest, is home to nearly 90 million people. Half of them live in conditions of extreme poverty. Key development indicators, such as those related to public health or literacy, are among the lowest in the nation. As in much of the world, it is the children who suffer most from poverty. Thousands live on the streets of the capital, Patna. Twelve-year-old Halima is one of them. She has been living on the streets for nearly a year and her existence is best described as more...

The Government of India (GOI) taking cognisance of poor female literacy has introduced various programmes and schemes for education of girls and women. The GOI’s national public education programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan aims to take universal primary education to each child by 2010. However, the quality of education in these primary schools is so low that the community is not interested in sending their children, especially girls, to school. While government programmes are efforts for engende more...

Education is the backbone of national development and is widely accepted as an instrument of social change. Yet the right to education for many including a large number of women and girls in India remains severely threatened. Biases and stereotypes prevent many children from marginalised communities prevent them from participating in or benefiting from education. Thousands of girls are either never sent to school or are forced to drop out because of poverty and traditional practice of not educat more...

Schooling is associated with a large number of positive outcomes, such as higher levels of reproductive health and HIV knowledge, later marriage, and more liberal gender attitudes.
The objective of this project is to empower adolescent girls and women by addressing their education, reproductive health, and livelihood needs. In 2006 Population Council researchers conducted a baseline survey of over 3,000 girls and women aged 10–45 in six rural woredas (districts) of Ethiopia's Amhara regio more...

The Gender and Peacebuilding Working Group of Peacebuild and Oxfam Canada held a two-day workshop in January 2008, to examine the state of gender training in the context of security and fragile states. The workshop highlighted the need for improved monitoring and evaluation, organisational learning and knowledge management around gender training and how it fits into other organisational change processes.

Poverty eradication has been identified as one of the most pronounced problems for the sustainable development agenda, which seeks to balance the three goals of environmental protection, healthy economic growth and social equity. Women and girls are a clear priority as 70% of the world’s estimated 1.3 billion people living in poverty, two thirds of the one billion illiterate adults, and two thirds of the 130 million children who are not in school. The economy can never be sustained while massi more...

The strong growth performance of the least developed countries (LDCs) as a group has been one of the most encouraging features of the global economy in the current decade. Economic growth since 2000 has been higher than in the 1990s. In 2005 and 2006, there was further growth acceleration and the LDCs
together achieved their strongest growth performance in 30 years. Their average
growth rate in both these years exceeded the 7 per cent target set by the LDCs and their development partners as a more...