Mobilization, meanings and measures: Reflections on girls' education

MDG3 on promoting gender equality and empowering women had a target for eliminating gender disparity in education by 2005. This target will be missed. Elaine Unterhalter highlights how, despite this failure, MDG3 has prompted a diverse discussion of meanings of gender equality and education, led to new ways for popular mobilization to articulate with UN institutions and prompted reassessment of the forms of measurement used to assess progress on this MDG. While these achievements need to be set in a context of the exclusion of certain key groups like teachers from these deliberations they indicate some elements of success on a constrained agenda. © Society for International Development.