Country Commitments to Gender Equality in Education

The international community has committed through legal and political frameworks to achieving gender equality in all spheres, including education. These frameworks include obligations to protect and secure women and girls' right to education through the elimination of discriminatory barriers, whether they exist in law or in everyday life, and to undertake positive measures to bring about equality, including in access of, within, and through education.
This paper firstly sets out the legal and political frameworks on gender equality in education to which states have committed and then describes how they have committed.
In the second section, the content of states’ commitments to achieve gender equality in education is explained, including the normative content of relevant provisions found in international and regional human rights treaties and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This section also includes a classification of states according to what legal commitments to women and girls’ right to education they have made.
The final section details how states can be held accountable for failure to meet their legal commitments to gender equality in education, including what mechanisms are available and examples of how these mechanisms have been used to hold states accountable.

This paper is also background paper prepared for the 2018 Global education monitoring report gender review: Meeting our commitments to gender equality in education.