Cover(final) - United Nations Girls' Education Initiative

INTRODUCTION 3
people access other forms of wellbeing. In
this report, we focus only on girls’ and
women’s access to different levels of
education, from pre-primary to adult, as
an indicator of their basic capabilities.
• The access to resources and
opportunities domain
This primarily refers to the ability to apply
or use one’s basic capabilities through
access to economic assets (such as
agricultural land or credit) and resources
(such as daily wages or factory
employment) as well as political
opportunities (from representation in
national parliaments to parent–teacher
associations). In the context of the
education system, resources have been
identified as those inputs and services that
enable a person to acquire basic
capabilities and use them to expand their
wellbeing. These include the specific
availability of suitable infrastructure, quality
inputs and incentives. Opportunities lie
embedded in the contextual economic and
political realities of individual societies, and
are here measured with reference to
broader indicators of human development
and empowerment.
• The security domain
The focus here is on reduced vulnerability
to violence and conflict, which can result
in physical and psychological harm and
prevent individuals from attaining their full
potential. Physical violence could be
manifest in conflict and post-conflict
situations and in society at large. We have
also interpreted violence in broader
structural terms to include economic
violence reflected through poverty or child
labour, or as socio-cultural violence within
families and communities in the garb of
child marriage and lack of freedom of
movement for women, or within the specific
context of schools in the form of corporal
punishment.
These three domains are interrelated, but gains
in any one will not automatically translate into
gender equality without attention to the others.
For instance, evidence from Latin America
indicates that even though girls and boys enrol
in equal numbers in primary and even
secondary schools, women continue to be
disadvantaged in the labour market relative to
men with similar education and experience. If
the goal of attaining gender equality is to be
met, then it is important to pay attention to each
of these domains, building synergies between
them, rather than focusing exclusively on one
or the other.
Women’s empowerment is closely related to
gender equality, but distinct from it. It implies
not just that women should have equal
capabilities and equal access to resources and
opportunities, but that they must also have the
agency or ability to use those rights,
capabilities, resources and opportunities to