A new era for girls report:Taking stock of 25 years of progress

News:Recently, UNICEF along with Plan International and United Nations Women has released a report titled “A New era for girls: Taking stock on 25 years of progress”.

Facts:

About the report:

• The report is issued in the context of the Generation Equality campaign and to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Key takeaways from the report:

• The number of out-of-school girls worldwide dropped by 79 million between 1998 and 2018.
• The number of female youth aged 15-24 years who are illiterate declined from 100 million to 56 million between 1995 and 2018, but 1 in 10 female youth remain illiterate today.
• Since 1995,the proportion of young women who were married as children has declined globally from 1 in 4 to approximately 1 in 5.
• However,still one in every 20 girls aged 15-19 which is around 13 million has experienced rape in a lifetime.
• Over the past 25 years, the adolescent birth rate has declined from 60 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19 years to 44 births worldwide.

Additional information:

About UNICEF:

• UNICEF acronym of United Nations Children’s Fund was created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.It is headquartered in New York, USA.
• It is a special program of the United Nations (UN) devoted to aiding national efforts to improve the health, nutrition, education, and general welfare of children.
• It publishes the State of the World’s Children report every year.

About UN Women:

• UN Women is the United Nations entity established in 2010.It is dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.

About Generation Equality Forum:

• Generation Equality Forum is a civil society–centred, multi-stakeholder, global gathering for gender equality convened by UN Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France.
• The Forum will kick off in Mexico City in May 2020 and culminate in France in July 2020.
• It will celebrate the power of women’s rights and take stock of progress and set an agenda of concrete action to realize gender equality before 2030.