In case you missed it, exciting news came out of the opening session of the UN General Assembly last Monday: after nearly three years of negotiations, member states voted to create a UN agency for women.

The new agency’s mandate will be to “promote the rights and well-being of women worldwide and to work towards gender equality.” Currently, the UN’s gender programs are scattered across various agencies through four different programs: UNIFEM, the Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW). The new entity will be headed by an Under-Secretary General who reports to the UN’s Secretary General, on par with agencies like UNICEF and UNHCR.

Groups that have been campaigning for the body (such as Gender Equality Architecture Reform, or GEAR) hope that a composite, super-agency will not only raise the prominence of gender issues on the global agenda but also boost funding for women through the UN, which they say has been low under the current structure. GEAR and others are calling for $1 billion in start-up money for the new agency (for comparison, the 2007 budgets for UNICEF and UNIFEM in 2007 were $129 million and $3 billion, respectively).

There is no doubt that the step is a good one for the world’s women, especially those living in the world’s poorest countries. For over two decades, development experts have been saying that countries who invest in education, health and economic opportunities for their women see greater results in poverty reduction and development across the board. Yet while some progress has been made in improving the lives of women around the globe (through expanded access to microfinance and treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, for example), the fact remains that women are still bearing the brunt of extreme poverty and disease and in many countries, are systematically excluded from the economy and politics and living in fear of violence and rape.

The UN decision follows other signs that momentum is building for a renewed effort to tackle global women’s issues. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama created the first ever Office on Global Women’s Issues in his Administration (with veteran women’s advocate Melanne Verveer at its head) and in Congress, Senator Barbara Boxer now chairs a subcommittee with global women’s issues in its purview. The need to invest in women was also a recurring key theme of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to Africa, and this past month both the Clinton Global Initiative and the New York Times have highlighted the topic in a major way.

So it seems that everyone- and now the UN- agrees: women are key to a healthier, more prosperous and stable world. The challenge is now to translate this growing consensus into action. At the UN, details on the new agency will be ironed out over the coming months after Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon comes up with a proposal to member states on the body’s mission, funding, structure and oversight. The first indication of how much muscle the new agency will have. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the FY011 budget should be a good sign of where the Administration’s priorities lie and how they match with Congress. We’ll be watching these developments at ONE closely, so stay tuned here for news from both fronts.

-Nora Coghlan

Tonight PBS’s “Wide Angle” series will begin airing part 3 of the program Time for School. A 12-year documentary project on global education, Time for School has been following a group of students in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania since they first entered in 2002.

According to PBS,

These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations.

Check out this brief clip:

You can check your local listings here, and join in at 12:00 pm EST tomorrow for a live discussion with the film’s producers and experts on global education through PBS’s website here.

If you get a chance to check it out, let us know what you think in the comments thread!

-Chris Scott

Intel Corporation, Save the Children and Kiva.org have joined forces to raise awareness and funds in an effort to address two of the world’s most pressing challenges – providing access to quality education and fostering economic development where it’s needed most. Intel’s “The Small Things Challenge” aims to help ensure children in developing countries can attend primary school and entrepreneurs in need have a chance at success. Throughout the developing world more than 75 million primary age children are not in school – robbing them of future opportunity continuing the cycle of poverty – and at least 80 percent of humanity lives on less than ten dollars a day, according to data from the United Nations.

With the “Small Things Challenge,” we are encouraging you to do a very small thing in order to make a big difference. Through the program, Intel hopes to donate up to $300,000 this year to Save the Children’s Rewrite the Future education initiative, which is focused on securing quality education for the millions of children out of school due to war and armed conflict, and to Kiva.org, which facilitates microloans to entrepreneurs in need around the world.

So what is the “small thing” you can do? Visit www.smallthingschallenge.com and click on the “Intel will donate 25 cents for you” button on the left-hand-side of the website. For every click, Intel will donate 25 cents to be shared equally between Kiva.org and Save the Children. So easy to do over a morning cup of coffee! And better yet, it’s FREE.

To learn more about Save the Children or the Rewrite the Future initiative, you can also visit www.savethechildren.org.

To learn more about Kiva, visit www.kiva.org.

-Matt Flannery, Co-Founder and CEO of Kiva, & Ana Rahona, Communications Director, Save the Children

A mother and daughter, Sarita, who attends early childhood development classes in Nepal where teachers are trained by Save the Children. Sarita’s parents never went to school. They are determined to help Sarita have better opportunities.

Did you know that more children drop out of school in first or second grade than in any other year in most low-income countries?

If we are to achieve Millennium Development Goal #2 to make sure all children get an education, we need to do a better job of preparing children to go to school and stay in school.

Save the Children’s 10th annual State of the World’s Mothers report, released today, focuses on the link between early childhood development and future success in school. The report finds that millions of children are not prepared to succeed in school.

We need to do more than just teach ABCs and 1-2-3s. Eighty-five percent of brain development occurs before age 3. It’s clear we need to start earlier, and be smarter, to ensure a quality education for all children.

Mothers and families today are juggling child-rearing with work and threats brought on by poverty, AIDS, displacement and more. They’re doing some wonderful things for their children every day, but they often need extra help to help their children overcome the challenges they face.

It’s not complicated. There are simple, low-cost activities to keep children safe, healthy and learning. And, these activities are virtually the same, whether families live in the mountain villages of Nepal or the cattle ranches of Uganda. For example, mothers and care givers can read to their children or if no one can read, families can tell stories and rhyme with their children; and they can name things babies see and hear.

Do these programs work? Absolutely. For example, all illustrated in this video, in Nepal, more than 95 percent of children who had early learning opportunities went on to primary school, compared to 75 percent of non-participating children. And, in the Philippines, children who participated in early childhood development programs had a 5 to 10 percent school drop out rate, compared to the national average of 50 percent.

So, why are early childhood development activities not a part of every young child’s life? (more…)

75 million children are out of school globally — a figure equivalent to the entire primary school-aged population in Europe and North America.

More than half of the out-of-school children are girls. Around the world, girls are much more likely than boys to never be enrolled in school, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (72% of out-of-school girls have never been enrolled, compared to 55% for boys).

That’s why ONE is teaming with the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) to support The Big Read: a new storybook encouraging literacy and education for everyone. Contributions to the book come from influential figures including Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan as well as Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Natalie Portman, Paulo Coelho and others.

Because of the important work ONE members do in advocating for global education, a ONE member will have her or his story published in The Big Read book. Click here to learn more and submit your story.

Education is a sound investment in people, global economies, and security. Education can offer a pathway for moving out of poverty, to finding a good job, and to becoming an active and valuable contributor to the social and economic health of our communities.

Education is particularly critical for girls. Educating girls for five years could boost child survival rates by up to 40%. Educated mothers are 50% more likely to immunize their children than are uneducated mothers. Providing an extra one year of education beyond the average boosts earnings by 10-20% for females, compared to 5-15% for males. And increasing the share of women with a secondary education by one percentage point boosts annual per capita income by 0.3%.

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