Unicef's annual flagship report, The State of the World's Children, published this month, said, 'Every year an increasing number of children are accommodated within primary education, but available places are not sufficient to keep pace with the annual growth in the school-age population.
'As a result, the global number of children out of school stubbornly remains undiminished at 121 million - and the majority is still girls.'
The worst affected area is sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of girls left out of school has risen from 20 million in 1990 to 24 million in 2002.
South Asia, east Asia and the Pacific region are also severely affected, while enrolment levels in Latin America and the Caribbean are close to those in industrialised countries.
Barriers to the classroom include schools sited too far from home, lack of clean water and separate toilet facilities and the ever-present threat of violence in and around schools.
Carol Bellamy, Unicef executive director, said that there were nine million fewer girls than boys in school. She added, 'International development efforts have been glaringly inadequate at getting girls into school in too many countries. In this report the findings are clear: gender discrimination is hampering development efforts, starting with the fundamental right of every child to go to school.'
The report called for each country to create a national ethos recognising the value of educating girls, the integration of education into national plans for poverty reduction, the scrapping of all school fees and increased international funding for schooling. It said, 'Despite donor nations' 1990 promises for extra funding for education and their 1996 commitment to ensure universal primary education by 2015, total aid flows to developing countries actually declined during the 1990s, and bilateral funding for education plummeted even further.'
The report said girls denied education were more vulnerable to poverty, hunger, violence, abuse, exploitation and trafficking, and disease, including HIV/AIDS, and were more likely to die in childbirth. But the positive impact of educating girls was equally dramatic, because 'as mothers, educated women are more likely to have healthy children, and more likely to ensure that their children, both boys and girls, complete school'.
The report pointed out that standard approaches to achieving universal education had failed because they did not take account of specific barriers to girls gaining access to education. 'Because of the persistent and often subtle gender discrimination that runs through most societies, it is girls who are sacrificed first - being the last enrolled and the first withdrawn from schools when times get tough,' it said.