GENEVA, Nov 25: The world is set to miss its target of getting as many girls as boys into schools by the end of this year, the UN children’s fund (Unicef) said on Friday.

In a new study, Unicef said that efforts to achieve gender parity in primary education were off track, despite progress in many nations.

Some 115 million children remain out of primary schools, and 90 million of these are girls, it said.

That not only affected individual girls and their families, but also puts at risk wider efforts to cut poverty, Unicef noted.

In a statement, Unicef head Ann Veneman said: “Education of children, especially girls, is the cornerstone to national progress, because it leads to greater economic productivity, reduced infant and maternal mortality, and a greater likelihood that the next generation of children will go to school.”

World leaders at a 2000 UN summit set eight so-called Millennium Development Goals, with the ultimate aim to greatly reduce global poverty by 2015.

Among these was promoting gender equality by eliminating disparities between boys and girls in primary and secondary schools by 2005, and at all levels of the education system by 2015.

That fed into another goal, which was to ensure that by 2015 all boys and girls have at least a complete primary education.

Unicef said that among the 180 countries for which it had data, 125 are on course to meet the 2005 target, 34 of them industrialised nations and 91 developing countries.

This shows that closing the gender gap is possible, said Unicef officials. But around 50 nations, mostly the world’s poorest, are still running behind.—AFP