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Since 2008, Gender Equality has been one of two global priorities for UNESCO. In May 2011, UNESCO launched the Global Partnership for Girls’ and Women’s Education, also known as “Better Life, Better Future”, which aims to increase learning opportunities for adolescent girls and women and to find solutions to some of the biggest obstacles to their education. To further advance the global priority of Gender Equality, since 2015 a dedicated Section of Education for Inclusion and Gender Equality specifically addresses the gender dimensions in education that contribute to differential access, participation, completion, and learning outcomes by boys and girls, and men and women. The evaluation examines UNESCO’s programme interventions in girls’ and women’s education during the period 2015 to 2017, in particular to ascertain the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of initiatives, and to clarify the strategic role and positioning of the Organization in supporting girls’ and women’s education at regional and country levels.

The evaluation found that although UNESCO’s efforts for enhancing girls’ and women’s education are clearly aligned to SDG 4 and SDG 5 and also broadly in line with the overall principle of leaving no one behind, there is at times a trade-off between targeting the hardest to reach and other donor priorities, and UNESCO needs to more clearly position its efforts in support of girls’ and women’s education and its niche in the 2030 Agenda. Furthermore, continued efforts are required to scale up and/or replicate small-scale interventions, to better ensure sustainability and to consolidate mechanisms for coordination and information sharing among different interventions to seize synergies and enhance organizational learning.