Millennium Development Goals

The work of our Foundation is supporting activities within the framework of many world movements for education for girls, including the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Please find below links to information related to the vital importance of girls' education in the developing world.

CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency)
www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/education

Basic education can help prevent poverty, sickness and conflict. Learning how to read and write opens the door to so many possibilities: keeping track of sales and purchases in small businesses, increasing knowledge about how to stay healthy and prevent HIV/AIDS, and reducing violence by encouraging understanding and tolerance. Basic education helps individuals reach their full potential as productive members of society.

That is why the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is emphasizing basic education as part of its focus on social development. Within the context of its poverty-reduction mandate and priorities, the Agency will strengthen its programming and play a leadership role with other countries in basic education, health and nutrition, HIV/AIDS, and child protection.

While high-quality basic education is important for everyone, supporting girls' education is the single-highest-yielding investment that a developing country can make. Studies show that girls who are educated marry later, have fewer and healthier children, and are better able to care for their families.

UNICEF
www.unicef.org

Education is vital to ensuring a better quality of life for all children and a better world for all people. But if girls are left behind, those goals can never be achieved.

In country after country, educating girls yields spectacular social benefits for the current generation and those to come. An educated girl tends to marry later and have fewer children. The children she does have will be more likely to survive; they will be better nourished and better educated. She will be more productive at home and better paid in the workplace. She will be better able to protect herself against HIV/AIDS and to assume a more active role in social, economic and political decision-making throughout her life.

The World Bank
www.worldbank.org/education

Girls' Education: A World Bank Priority
The World Bank is committed to fighting poverty and has embraced the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals as a World Bank priority. It has recognized the striking body of empirical evidence that demonstrates strong benefits of girls' education, which span across a wide range of areas including maternal and child health, social stability, environmental benefits and economic growth. Girls' education and the promotion of gender equality in education are critical to development, and policies and actions that do not address gender disparities miss critical development opportunities.

UNESCO
www.unesco.org/education/efa

Education for All

The EFA commitment is specifically to:

• Ensure universal primary education (UPE) for all children by 2015 (an MDG)
• Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education (an MDG)
• Improve early childhood care and education
• Ensure equitable access to "life skills" programs
• Achieve a 50 percent increase in adult literacy by 2015
• Improve all aspects of the quality of education

UNGEI (UN Girls Education Initiative)
www.ungei.org