EFA’s Goal 5: Assessing Gender Parity and Equality In Education: Unfinished Agenda for 21st Century

International consensus on education priorities accords an important place to achieving gender justice in the educational sphere. Both the Dakar Education for All’s 5th goal and the Millennium Development goal emphasise goal that are distinguished as gender parity goal [achieving equal participation of girls and boys in all forms of education based on their proportion in the relevant age-groups in the population] and gender equality goal [ensuring educational equality between boys and girls]. In turn these have been characterised as quantitative/numerical and qualitative goal respectively. There is thus need to understand the reports of UNGEI, EFA’S global monitoring report and MDG framework so that the meaning of the term gender parity and gender equality with reference to education can be connoted, linkages between them can be explored, and the best mechanisms to measure progress towards these goal can be identified and also take a stock of the progress made with respect to some of these questions in various countries and sub-regions especially in reference to the fifth goal of EFA Act (Education For All’s act). The paper concludes with need recognizing that bringing all girl children to school is not merely an educational action but requires transformation of attitudes and behavioural dynamics of society, so that gender equality is seen as a value in itself worth pursuing