Girls can't wait: why girls' education matters, and how to make it happen now

This is the year that the world will miss the first, and most critical of all the Millennium Development Goals - gender parity in education by 2005. Over the next decade, unless world leaders take drastic action now, unacceptably slow progress on girls' education will account for over 10 million unnecessary child and maternal deaths, will cost poor countries as much as 3 percentage points in lost economic growth, and lead to at least 3.5 million avoidable cases of HIV/AIDS. In response to this unacknowledged emergency, this paper proposes a new action plan to get every girl in school and learning.