The United Nations child-at-school youth ambassadors have started a youth-for-gender-equality and girl-at-school campaign to push governments around the world to give teenage girls priority in education.
The drive was part of the side events at the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York. Led by the Ugandan representatives in the Global Youth Ambassadors, Mr Hillary Taylor Sseguya, the youths want the girl-child, particularly in Africa, to be at the centre of education policy discussion and implementation to promote their empowerment and gender equality.
“We want a world [and] school drive addressing challenges of young girls and children with disabilities [to be] given equal opportunities … to exploit their ingenuity through skills development,” Mr Sseguya said.
The project, a part of the Education Equity Research Initiative, is a collaborative partnership led by FHI 360 and Save the Children US with the common objective of “advancing research to inform policy and programming on effective ways of strengthening equity in and through education systems”.
Rising inequality is one of the greatest challenges facing the global community, according to the world charity organisation, Oxfam. While outcomes are improving for many children, a vast percentage of students lag behind, and there is limited information on the root causes and magnitude of this inequality.
This new initiative addresses the information gap by combining efforts to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to education and toward more equitable strategies that recognize the particular needs of individual children, according to Education Equity Research Initiative, FHI360.