Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the UK's role in the Global Partnership for Education; and what steps she is taking to encourage greater gender equality in education.

The UK continuously appraises the effectiveness of its programmes via a number of mechanisms. This includes Annual Reviews which contain analysis of value for money and to what extent programmes’ anticipated results are being achieved. Annual Reviews of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) are publically available on the Dev Tracker website. In addition the UK has been pushing a reform agenda of GPE’s operational processes, which has seen the Partnership make significant progress in areas such as results reporting and risk management. Alice Albright, CEO of GPE, acknowledged DFID’s pivotal role in improving GPE’s operations in evidence to the IDC.

The UK is strongly committed to girls education, as one of our four pillars in the Strategic Vision for Women and Girls. We support gender equitable education through our bilateral and central education programmes; our education research; and our international relationships with partners such as UNICEF and UNGEI. For example, the Girls Education Challenge programme is supporting up to one million marginalised girls benefit from a quality education.