Briefing and Discussion with Members of the UN Millennium Project Task Force 3 on Education and Gender Equality

Sponsored by OSI's Network Women's Program and the UN Millennium Project Task Force 3, this event will include the following participants, all members of the Task Force: Diane Elson, University of Essex, UK; Carolyn Hannan, director of the UN Division for the Advancement of Women; Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW); Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, director of OSI's Network Women’s Program; Joanne Sandler, deputy director of UNIFEM; Gita Sen, IIM India; and Cream Wright, UNICEF. Also participating will be Caren Grown, senior associate to the Task Force, and Chandrika Bahadur from the Millennium Project.

About the Millennium Project and Task Force 3

The Millennium Project was launched in 2002 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown to recommend the best strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including identifying the operational priorities, organizational means of implementation, and financing structures necessary to meet the goals. The project is being led by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and is being implemented in coordination with 10 task forces, each of which focuses on a particular Millennium Development Goal.

Task Force 3 is charged with assessing progress toward two goals: universal primary education and gender equality/women’s empowerment. The Task Force’s work is coordinated by Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development (CDG); Amina Ibrahim, national coordinator for Education for All (EFA) at the Federal Ministry of Education in Nigeria; and Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

The Task Force has met three times, and meetings have resulted in several key messages and recommendations for national government and international donors, which are summarized in several background papers and interim reports, available online at www.unmillenniumproject.org. A subset of the Task Force is meeting in New York on April 28-29 to discuss its recommendations for the final report, which will be submitted to the UN in December 2004.