'This report paints a picture of where countries stand in their efforts to achieve the attainment of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and gender equality, improving literacy and educational quality, and increasing life-skills and early childhood education programmes, highlights innovative and best practice, suggests priorities for national strategies and looks at how the international community is meeting its commitments towards EFA. .All countries have pledged to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, as agreed at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000, a year when a significant majority of the 104 million children not in primary school were girls and almost two-thirds of the 860 million non-literate people were women. .But ensuring the right to learn is not just a question of numbers. It is part of a much broader agenda to achieve gender equality so that girls and boys, women and men, enjoy the same learning opportunities and outcomes, personally, professionally and politically. This intention is enshrined in the 2015 goal to achieve gender equality which covers rights to, within and through education.'