The Director-General of UNESCO, Ms Irina Bokova, signed the UN Joint Statement on Accelerating Efforts to Advance the Rights of Adolescent Girls. The other signatories are the Executive Heads of UNFPA, UNICEF, UNIFEM, ILO and WHO. The statement was launched on 3 March 2010 in New York, during the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. This Commission is currently conducting a fifteen-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action.

The Statement expresses a common vision among the signatories to intensify their agencies’ support to advancing policies and programmes that empower the hardest-to-reach adolescent girls, particularly those aged 10 to 14 years old. For UNESCO, it furthers the Organization's commitment to the promotion of Gender Equality as one of its two global priorities.

The Dakar Framework for Action (2000) aims to ensure Gender Equality IN education. However, worldwide, girls still face a distinctive set of barriers to education that must be overcome if we want to meet our targets: gender-based violence in and around schools, early marriage - which prevents them from progressing beyond primary school - and the lack of non-sexist and inclusive curricula that promote gender equality. Teachers’ attitudes and expectations as well as the quality of textbooks also play an important role in encouraging girls to attend and stay in schools.