Partnership, participation and power for gender equality in education

Abstract

This publication was prepared as part of the work of the committee overseeing the planning for UNGEI’s E4 conference The E4 Conference: Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality, Dakar, Senegal 17th-20th May 2010. Although, over the last ten years, children around the world have had increased opportunities to attend school and benefit from education, nearly a billion people still receive little or no education. The majority are women and girls who face gender inequalities in many areas of their lives. E4 is part of a world-wide mobilisation of partnerships to realise the rights of girls and women to education and training and address the gender inequalities that prevent initiatives from reaching their full potential to transform societies. E4 brings together activists of all types—practitioners on the ground, national and international policy makers, researchers—who work on gender and education. Together we will engage with each other tackling the question of partnership, participation and power for gender equality in education and addressing the E4 themes of ‘Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality’. Through presentations, papers, talks, video conversations, and e-discussions we will review ten years of the work of UN Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) and other organisations concerned with gender and education and bring more voices into the conversation to deepen understanding of policies and practices in education that can support gender equality and the empowerment of women. This situation analysis, ‘Partnership, participation and power for gender equality in education’, was prepared for the E4 conference. It gives an overview of what has been achieved in the past decade, and points to ways in which inadequate attention to inequali-ties in power and obstacles to participation have meant the important partnerships established cannot yet fully reach their potential without additional mobilisation of analysis and action