The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals related to poverty, education, gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and development set in the year 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit, and adopted by 189 nations. The eight MDGs are associated with 21 quantifiable targets, tracked by 60 statistical indicators in annual reports issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The goals target attainment in the year 2015. Country-by-country data is also available.

Compared with a century ago or more, when female education was rare, girls’ access to education has improved dramatically. The charts measure gender parity by the number of girls enrolled per 100 boys in tertiary education such as colleges, universities, and technical training programs. A figure of 100 represents a 1:1 ratio, or parity. The charts show a higher proportion of girls than boys taking advantage of higher education after completing secondary schooling. In four world regions—Northern Africa, Southeastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), significant gains for young women in higher education took place, their enrollment even overtaking that of young men. If this cohort completes higher education programs, it will have significant implications for the employment picture in these regions in the near future. Elsewhere in the world, fairly significant gains in girls’s participation in higher education took place, but fell short of achieving parity. Only in Sub-Saharan Africa was there a slight decline in gender parity during the period. Further, in developed regions, young women are enrolled in higher education at 129% of young men’s enrollment, and in developing regions they have achieved 96% of parity.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals related to poverty, education, gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and development set in the year 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit, and adopted by 189 nations. The eight MDGs are associated with 21 quantifiable targets, tracked by 60 statistical indicators in annual reports issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The goals target attainment in the year 2015. Country-by-country data is also available.

The charts illustrate the aggregate data on gender parity in the world at three levels of education—primary, secondary, and higher, or tertiary education. Sixty-four percent of countries have achieved or exceeded gender parity in primary education, and less than a third of countries lagging behind in basic schooling. Sixty-five percent of countries have achieved or exceeded gender parity at the secondary education level, with more than a third still unable to offer secondary schooling to all girls. Only 6 per cent of countries have achieved parity in tertiary education for girls, but the disparity in favor of young women in higher education reflects the situation in developed countries. The 32 percent of countries that have not achieved gender parity in higher education include poorer countries where opportunities for higher education are relatively scarce, and girls remain at a disadvantage.

To further reveal the disparity among population groups, the second chart focuses on differences in residence and wealth related to gender parity in education, based on available data for 108 developing countries. In rural communities, only 39 percent of girls attend secondary education, in comparison with 45 percent of boys. By contrast, 59 percent of girls in urban areas attend secondary school—near parity with 60 percent of boys attending. Correlating household wealth with secondary school education, a tremendous gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in education opportunities becomes apparent. While 74 percent of boys and 72 percent of girls in the richest one fifth of families attend secondary school, only 31 percent of boys and 24 percent of girls in the poorest quintile of families attend secondary school.

To bridge these gaps, both cultural attitudes and public investment and policy need to be more favorable toward education. School fees, whether for tuition, transportation, uniforms or books are prohibitive barriers among poor families. There might not be sufficient daylight for rural students who have to travel long distances to attend secondary school to also study and complete household chores. Unsafe roads and concerns for the security of girls attending distant schools may also serve as cultural or practical barriers. However, the practice of secluding unmarried girls might be overcome through local recruitment of teachers or other creative means of achieving gender parity in education.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals related to poverty, education, gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and development set in the year 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit, and adopted by 189 nations. The eight MDGs are associated with 21 quantifiable targets, tracked by 60 statistical indicators in annual reports issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The goals target attainment in the year 2015. Country-by-country data is also available.

Compared with a century ago or more when female education was rare, girls' access to education has improved dramatically. The charts measure gender parity by the number of girls enrolled in school per 100 boys. A figure of 100 represents a 1:1 ratio, or parity. Three regions—Southeastern Asia, Eastern Asia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are near parity in primary education, and all but Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia) are at 90% of parity or better. Developed countries are at parity, while aggregate data for developing countries shows 95% of parity.

The second chart presents a picture of weaker gender parity in secondary education, or grades 6-12: slight losses in Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and the CIS, and significant gains in Western and Southern Asia, and Northern Africa. During the period between 1999 and 2007, girls in Eastern Asia, Southeastern Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean exceeded boys in secondary education enrollment. Aggregate data for developing countries shows that the goal of parity in secondary education, though improving slowly, is within reach at 94%, though Sub-Saharan Africa, Western and Southern Asia, and Oceania must bridge a gap of between 13 and 21 percentage points to achieve parity. The statistics for girls' secondary education have negative implications for the future of gender parity or better in higher education in the next age cohort, or age group, preparing for higher education in the coming years.

Education of girls is viewed as a priority because it has been shown to affect many other areas of human welfare. Statistics have shown correlations between education of mothers and infant mortality, improvements in child nutrition and sanitation, delayed marriage, and predictors of school enrolment and success for the next generation.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals related to poverty, education, gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and development set in the year 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit, and adopted by 189 nations. The eight MDGs are associated with 21 quantifiable targets, tracked by 60 statistical indicators in annual reports issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The goals target attainment in the year 2015. Country-by-country data is also available.

This chart shows a key indicator for malnutrition—underweight children from birth to five years. In developing regions, the proportion of children under five years old who are undernourished declined from 33 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2006, but 140 million children in developing countries were recorded as underweight in 2006. According to public health experts, undernourishment among young children is a sound indicator of inadequate nutrition in the population as a whole. As the 2009 MDG report states, "Adequate nutrition is vital for building children's immune systems and for their motor and cognitive development…The consequences can be fatal: more than one third of child deaths worldwide are attributable to undernutrition." (p. 12) Eastern Asia, and China in particular, reduced the percentage of underweight children between 1990 and 2006 by more than half. In Southern Asia, despite progress since 1990, almost half of young children are underweight. In Sub-saharan Africa, there has been insufficient progress, where more than a quarter of the region's children are underweight. Urban children are half as likely to be underweight as rural children in the same country. In Eastern Asia, where improvement has occurred, inadequate nutrition is still almost five times as high in rural areas. Notable in these statistics is the progress recorded for Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa, and parts of Asia. There has been no significant progress in Western Asia, a likely result of the large number of refugees and conflict.

Overall worldwide progress is already insufficient to achieve the MDG goal to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. In developing regions between 1990 and 2007, a 5 percentage point decline in the proportion of underweight children under five years of age was achieved, leaving over a quarter of all children in these regions underfed. Progress in reducing hunger is being slowed or reversed by rising food prices due to changing diets, economic growth, a population increases, urbanization, poor agricultural policies, and use of food crops for biofuel.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

This image appeared following the arrival of a Chinese reform agenda and the end of the Maoist campaigns. Entitled, "Studying for the mother country, 1986," it presents a girl at the center of an image that invokes many of the official "four modernizations" (specifically, industry, technology, agriculture, and defense) that were proclaimed by a new leader, Deng Xiaoping, as the primary goals for building a strong Chinese nation. Students may explore the ways in which the busy detail of this image represents themes of industrialization, urbanization, national progress (as symbolized by a space program, among other projects), as well as the combined imagery of the flag, the doves around it, and, importantly, the tools that the girl herself thoughtfully wields.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

In “Protect the great results of the Cultural Revolution, 1974,” a cohort of determined youth in red armbands replace adults and offer their own voices to a new definition of the revolutionary cause through the posters and slogans they paint. Gender is a theme of particular value here, both in comparison with "The happy life Chairman Mao gave us, 1954" image and "Studying for the mother country, 1986". In this poster, we find a determined teenage girl leading the way rather than serving the table.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People's Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

This image, "The happy life Chairman Mao gave us, 1954," offers a domestic scene which appears surprisingly familiar to many students in its presentation of a happy family meal. Students have commented upon the ways in which children seem to symbolize the peace and material prosperity of China after the revolution of 1949. And yet, the prominence of the image of Mao himself is also noted – indeed, one student has insightfully observed that Mao himself appears to be joining the family at its very own dinner table.

These photographs come from The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946 website, a collection of photographs that provide a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. Morrison, a native of Germany, spent time as a resident of Beijing where she built a rich collection of photographs of daily life during the 1930s and early 1940s. Among many topics, Morrison was particularly interested in street scenes and composed photos of shops, commerce, street-side entertainments, and the daily life of local residents. Included among these are a good number of images of children. These three images focus on the street-side sale of toys, sold by adults to children and also sold by children as seen in the third image. An exploration of these images raises intriguing issues regarding some of the material objects that made up a child's daily life (or part of a special occasion) as well as the social roles attached to their production, sale, and consumption. Indeed, it would seem – unlike the patterns of toy consumption enjoyed by children in a later day – that these roles overlapped greatly.

These photographs come from The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946 website, a collection of photographs that provide a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. Morrison, a native of Germany, spent time as a resident of Beijing where she built a rich collection of photographs of daily life during the 1930s and early 1940s. Among many topics, Morrison was particularly interested in street scenes and composed photos of shops, commerce, street-side entertainments, and the daily life of local residents. Included among these are a good number of images of children. These three images focus on the street-side sale of toys and on the children who admired and sometimes purchased the various objects. An exploration of these images raises intriguing issues regarding some of the material objects that made up a child's daily life (or part of a special occasion) as well as the social roles attached to their production, sale, and consumption. Indeed, it would seem – unlike the patterns of toy consumption enjoyed by children in a later day – that these roles overlapped greatly.

The Yin Yu Tang house provides a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. The house was built for a merchant family named Huang at the turn of the 19th century and, with the consent of later generations of the Huang family, would be painstakingly deconstructed, moved, and rebuilt to open in 2003 as a permanent exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

The museum offers a virtual tour of the house that serves as a useful tool for exploring the lived space and material culture of a family setting, as experienced by adults and also, as detail of the exhibit reveals, by children. Students may explore this virtual exhibit as if they are setting foot in the house themselves, gaining their own perspective on the domestic space that certain children experienced as well as the household objects that were dedicated to a child’s management and education.