The E4 Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality conferences, scheduled to take place between 12th April – 20th May 2010,  speak to the goal of strengthening and expanding partnerships for girls’ education around the most pressing obstacles many girls face in pursuit of education. An online e-conference will be held from 12th April – 14th May, followed by a face-to-face conference on 17th-20th May in Dakar, Senegal. Both conferences will examine issues of violence, poverty and educational quality and their intersections with participation, climate change and health.

Consistent with the participatory vision, we hope to foster partnership among a small community of activists, practitioners, policy-makers and scholars to build a common knowledge from which to tackle these issues and to plan collectively to dismantle them. To do this, we are emphasizing participation from groups whose voices are typically less heard in this conversation and who bring unique and valuable experience to the discussion. For optimum benefit, we are limiting participation at the in-person conference to a small group of 150 people and will be using a participatory and collaborative methodology oriented toward transformative action.

These conferences are organised by the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) in collaboration with the Beyond Access team, coordinated from the Institute of Education, University of London.

Latest Update

Issue 26 of Equals, the Beyond Access newsletter, has been published on July 13, 2010, and provides a retrospective of the E4 Conference from multiple angles.
Equals Newsletter

The Dakar conference has finished. We will continue to update this website and related sites, such as our YouTube channel and flickr. The webcast recordings, papers, and further information are available from the D-Conference page.

The Dakar declaration is now available from the UNGEI Website:
Dakar Declaration on Accelerating Girls’ Education and Gender Equality

United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative

The Education for All (EFA) flagship for girls’ education, the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) is a partnership that embraces the United Nations system, governments, donor countries, non-governmental organizations, civil society, the private sector, and communities and families; it works at global, regional and country levels. Its goal is to narrow the gender gap in primary and secondary education and to ensure that all children complete primary schooling, with girls and boys having equal access to all levels of education. Since its inception, UNGEI has been working to give an additional push to the Millennium Development Goals 2 and 3 and to advance the EFA goals. With the EFA and MDG end-dates approaching, these conferences ask: Can we get there by 2015?

Situation Analysis

A 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.

Read the Situation Analysis

Get involved

• Participate in the E4 e-conference
• Follow us on twitter @E4Conf
• Join our fans on facebook or join our facebook group
• Tag your tweets or flickr images with #E4Conf.