In 1989 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which spelled out a number of rights that are due every child. These include civil and human rights and economic, social, and cultural rights. It is not difficult to see why such a document was necessary. Globally, a billion children live in poverty — one in every two children in the world. The convention also addresses other concerns, including the fact that children make up half the world’s refugees, and the problems of child labor and exploitation, sexual violence and sex trafficking, police abuse of street children, HIV/AIDS orphans, lack of access to education, and lack of access to adequate health care. The convention has been ratified by more countries than any other human rights treaty — 193 countries as of 2014. The United States and Somalia remain the only two United Nations member nations that have not ratified it.

As the twenty-first century began, nearly a billion people — mostly women denied equitable access to education — were illiterate. Increasing economic globalization has put pressure on all governments to improve literacy rates and educational opportunities; the result has been reduced gender inequalities in education. While the percentage of illiterate adults in 2010 who were women was 64 percent, the percentage of girls among illiterate children was 60 percent, with the greatest gains in literacy occurring in South Asia and the Middle East.

Mexico pioneered a new approach to combating poverty that has been implemented in a growing number of countries. Conditional cash transfer, or CCT, provides a stipend to families who meet certain goals, such as keeping their children in school. This approach addresses poverty directly, while enlisting families to work toward its long-term solution by increasing education levels, which will broaden opportunities for new generations. Mexico’s Oportunidades (Opportunities) CCT was followed by Brazil’s Bolsa Famila (Family Scholarship) and by similar projects in many other countries in Latin America. Versions of the program have been introduced across Asia and the Middle East, including in Bangladesh, where a CCT program promotes the education of girls.